Republican Food: French President Macron nails his colours to the Mast of
Islamophobia
OPEN DEMOCRACY
10/13/2020
By Chris Myant
The targeting of Muslim food as a danger to public order was actually the
first of the measures outlined in the presidents speech on 2 October.
( OpenDemocracy.net) In the small Provençal town of Aups, where the local
Catholic church declares République française: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
[The French Republic: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity], above its main
entrance, there is a plain and nondescript monument put up in 1881. Its
plaque announces that it is there: A la memoire des citoyens morts en 1851
pour la défense des loi et de la République In memory of those citizens
who died in the 1851 defence of law and the Republic.
Why think of that when watching Emmanuel Macron nail his colours to the mast
of Islamophobia and announce that, if he gets his way, Muslim pupils in
French schools will have days when they will eat the pork served up on their
lunch plates or go hungry?
Aups was the scene of the final battle between a ragged force of locals who
had taken up arms to oppose the coup détat of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and
the troops of the local Prefect. The latter were party to Napoleons plot to
remove the democracy installed after the 1848 Revolution toppled the
monarchy established on the back of his uncles final defeat at Waterloo.
Louis-Napoleons supporters struck quickly at this one real attempt to block
his coup of 2 December 1851. After their defeat at Aups on 10 December, a
number of those thought to be the ringleaders were disposed of by firing
squad. Many of the rest were sent off to forced labour in the new French
colony of Algeria.
The Catholic church at Aups in the Var. | Some rights reserved.
There is just one mistake in the explanatory panel that the local council
added a few years back to the monument. It talks of how men from all over
the Haut Var converged on Aups. In fact, there were many women among the
insurgents. Their names are there listed on the rolls of those hustled off
to Toulon before the ships took them to Algeria. They are there in the
columns of the regional press. The Toulonnais on 15 December reported that,
two days after the battle, Two women, armed with pistols and dressed in
red, acting as cooks for the insurgents, have been arrested. If you intend
only to cook, you do not carry pistols.
These women were not just seditious and red, they were the purveyors of
the most odious passions according to Hippolyte Maquan, a local royalist
lawyer, who was the editor of a newspaper that effectively became the
official journal for the Prefect during the weeks of resistance to the coup.
One thought one was in the Kabyle (a region of Algeria, CM), he wrote in a
memoire a year later. It was the smala of some Abd-el-Kader of the
peasants cottages (the smala was the retinue of an Algerian leader, one of
the last of whom to surrender to the French had been Abd-el-Kader, CM) . . .
Why doubt that the Chapel of Mary, the Tower of David, the Boulevard of
Christianity in the Middle Ages, dominating this countryside and delivered
in the past from savage Saracen incursions, are today appealing to be
purged, consoled and saved from the socialist invasion, this heresy with a
bloody sensuality that would take us back to Muslim barbarity?
The Haussmanian revolution
Oof! The author of these words did not hang about long in the area. The
provincial lawyer and editor got promotion to Paris along with a Prefect he
had been helping turn an elected President into an authoritarian Emperor.
And who was this Prefect he had been assisting, this representative of the
central government power, executing the orders decided on in Paris? None
other than Le Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the Haussmann credited with
creating the centre of Paris as we know it today.
One of the latest histories of those two hectic decades in which much of old
Paris was knocked down and replaced with grand Haussmannian blocks of
flats along spacious boulevards explains that the purpose was the
reconquest of the city centre by the well-off . . . the Haussmannian
renovation undoubtedly significantly reinforced segregation across the
city.
The Prefect himself said he wanted to open great strategic arteries going
from the centre of Paris to the circumference, which will bit by bit drive
the workers out to the exterior where they can be distributed and which will
also help to keep an eye on them and contain them there as required. He
wrote that just after a visit to Paris by the Prussian general von Moltke
who himself said of all this: The workers are seeing themselves pushed out
to the suburbs. But one can easily see why. This has a positive influence on
the maintenance of order and public security.
This is the way that Paris still is. Only what Haussman, Maquan and von
Moltke would find different is that the workers pushed to the exterior are
Black and Muslim as much as they are white. They inhabit the dense housing
of departments like Seine-Saint-Denis to the north of the capital. Those who
live in the Haussmannian centre of the city cross their tracks when they
take certain Métro lines running north, pass the checkout in their
supermarket, dodge the guys steering the giant rubbish bins to the
dustcarts, tut-tut over the noise of the pneumatic drills recasting the
pavement or slum it by taking a cheap Uber taxi to the Opèra.
Seine-Saint-Denis
Seine-Saint-Denis was a department that got an early mention in Macrons
speech.
There would be a Republican awakening, he explained, with a new law to be
tabled in December. The first axis of this awakening, of this republican
patriotism, is a group of measures on public order and the neutrality of
public services which form an immediate, firm response to circumstances
reported and known, that are contrary to our principles. Local councillors,
sometimes under pressure from groups or communities, have considered and can
consider today imposing religious menus (the term he used in French was
menus confessionnels) in the canteen. We have cases of this in Departments
such as Seine-Saint-Denis but also in Normandy.
This would be banned in future by law in the interest of protecting the
neutrality of public services and also the maintenance of public order. And
this will in certain situations protect our local representatives in the
face of such pressure. If councillors did go so far as to vote in such
menus, the Prefect would step in and reverse the decision.
All this is very slippery language. Notice that he did not say such menus
had been introduced, only that they had been considered. And a menu
confessionnel: is it the same thing as a menu de substitution, making
available an alternative when pork is on the school meal menu, for instance?
So it is a complete non-question, a problem that does not exist? To think
that would be a great mistake. Like so much else in Macrons oratory, do not
look at the immediate meaning of the words but at the public sentiments he
is trying to play upon. The exercise is one of astonishing cynicism.
Like so much else in Macrons oratory, do not look at the immediate meaning
of the words but at the public sentiments he is trying to play upon.
In what possible way is it a danger for the stability of the worlds fourth
nuclear power to let a child of nine ask the staff in their school canteen:
Could I have an omelette? I dont eat pork.
And why the child? When an Emir or a Sheikh from an oil-rich Middle Eastern
state, let alone a Saudi prince, comes visiting the Elysée, does Macron
command that the welcoming feast be based entirely on food a Muslim is
expected not to eat? Of course we know it would not be like that. A menu
confessionnel would be prepared with the greatest of care. But MBS has a bit
more power than a kid called Mohammed in Seine Saint Denis.
At the same time
Hard to believe, yet this targeting of Muslim food as a danger to public
order was actually the first of the measures outlined in his speech on 2
October, long heralded as the moment when he would reveal his action plan to
deal with separatisms which became instead a drive against Islamist
separatism dressed in language that opened a door to wider prejudices.
Macron did say because there is with him always the careful at the same
time so he can claim to be balanced and unprejudiced that France had
allowed the creation of ghettos but now had to act so that the Republic can
enter back into the reality of peoples lives and ensure a republican
presence before every tower block.
Equality of opportunity was a must, but his solution was a combination of
tinkering with the crisis of schooling in the deprived suburbs like
Seine-Saint-Denis and the ineffective programme of actor testing to
reveal discrimination in jobs and housing.
Back in 2003 a commission appointed by President Chirac reported on the same
issues picked up by Macron. It plumped in favour of banning the hijab in
schools but it said that measures such as that would not be understood or
accepted by those against whom they were targeted unless something else was
done as well.
Secularism is not a familiar notion for many of our citizens. If it is
necessary to promote secularism, that will only be seen as legitimate if the
public authorities and the whole of society campaign against discriminatory
practices and in favour of equality of opportunity.
France got the ban on the hijab but not the campaign. Seventeen years on,
the situation is worse, as Macron implicitly recognised. But the problem for
official France is that dealing effectively with discrimination would show
that the real issue is not Mohammed from Seine-Saint-Denis asking for an
omelette let alone a chicken tagine with apricots and almonds, it is the
structures of disadvantage and discrimination that the French state
continues to protect.
Structures of disadvantage and discrimination
Like for instance that Catholic church in Aups with its secular, republican
declaration over its entrance. When the law making France a secular state
was voted in 1905, all such buildings became public property, their
maintenance a public charge. Religious buildings built after that date, such
as mosques, remain private property, their maintenance at the charge of the
believers and no one else. Far from the biggest issue, but an illustration
of the complex web that Macron exploits to his political advantage while
refusing to mount that campaign against discriminatory practices.
Instead, France continues to drift into deeper social separation and ever
more dangerous political waters. The day after the knife attack at the old
offices of Charlie Hebdo, a morning presenter on FranceInfo, one of the main
public news stations in French radio, had a little slip of the tongue. They
spoke of terrorisme islamique [Islamic terrorism] rather than terrorisme
islamiste [fundamentalist terrorism]. Neither they, nor anyone else on the
programme, corrected the mistake. Why would they? The Interior Minister,
Gérald Darmanin, himself did the same, alternating between the two formulas
when speaking about the event later that very day.
They spoke of terrorisme islamique rather than terrorisme islamiste.
Back sometime around the turn of the millennium, the Met ran a series of
advertising hoardings around London showing a Black guy in ordinary clothes
running through a street. The idea was to see if the stereotype prompted in
your mind was of a mugger rather than what the text then explained was
supposedly the case, a detective chasing a suspect.
Not sure how many Black staff there actually were then in the Mets CID
units, but, in the minutes immediately after the Paris attack, a certain
Youssef got a quick lesson about the stereotypes that plague the minds of
police in Paris.
He tried to catch the assailant who slashed and hacked at two random
journalists thinking he was attacking the Satan of Charlie Hebdo. He was
there on CCTV running after him and was promptly given ten hours
interrogation in a commissariat as the reward for his bravery, doing his
time even as politicians and commentators were queuing up on the airwaves to
intone against lamalgame, the stereotype that all who are islamique
[Muslim] are actually islamiste [devotees of political Islam]. The police
had found their video evidence on his attempted citizens arrest
troubling. The only trouble was in their own perverted minds.
La Haine, 1995. | Screenshot:YouTube.
Maquan in his descriptions of the lower orders who gave their lives in
defence of democracy was obsessed with the way the women behaved and
dressed. They had to be constrained and controlled those women in red,
pistols at their belts, supposedly hard at work in the field canteen at Aups
in December 1851.
And that Maquan of today, Gérald Darmanin? One had barely finished
contemplating Macrons speech before he was there in the National Assembly
denouncing a left Deputy who had dared to suggest that the President was
tilting at a non-existent windmill in order to avoid the real economic,
social and viral crisis facing France:
The situation is extremely grave and I cannot explain how a party like
yours, which has for so long denounced the opium of the people, is linked to
an Islamo-Leftism which is destroying the Republic.
Chris Myant started as a journalist in 1968 working for the Morning Star and
then 7Days. He later worked for the Commission for Racial Equality and
Equality and Human Rights Commission. For the last decade he has lived in
Paris where he is active in the National Union of Journalists.
Via OpenDemocracy.net
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