Archive Columns: Society & Politics

Right Wrong to Gloat about France (On the right's response to muslim riots)

     Speaking as what is now an apparent impossibility, i.e. as a conservative and a Francophile, I would like to suggest that the malicious and too predictable joy that the nastier sort of American conservatives are taking from France’s riots is undeserved.  If they cared to think beyond French pacifism and the usual cliché annoyances, they would find a theory of civic life and racial neutrality that are more consonant with conservative values than are the condescension, separatism and racial fetishism at the core of American law and culture.

     Let us first resolve some past grievances.  Virtually any American who ever spent time with the French, here or on their own soil, eventually had to bear a lecture on their greater sanctity with regard to race relations.  This was especially true in the wake of the American race riots.  I suspected at the time that the French notion of American blacks was based largely on their admiration for jazz musicians.  They therefore couldn’t understand why there could be any problem between whites and what was, somewhere in the back of their mind, a huge population of dazzling tenor saxophonists. “You Americans, they would say, I cannot understand this racism.  You see here, in France, everyone is equal and we do not care.”  Well, I would look around at what was, to an American, a homogeneity so perfectly typical as to make one giddy.  It was all French!  The formulas of polite address were everywhere the same, the clothes, the style.  And, as the jokes go, pretty much everyone was named Marcel DuPont, except for the occasional Spanish refugee.

     So now years later it’s nya nya and touché! to them, I guess.  It’s our turn to be sanctimonious and point out that this diversity thing is not so easy when you actually have some diversity to cope with.  But it’s a cheap and easy shot.  It is the simple superiority of experience over naiveté.  Just as the French might counter that it is their experience over our naiveté that is at the bottom of their pacifism.  (Some short while after the Iraq invasion, my wife and I were passing through Arras which was destroyed in World War II and then carefully rebuilt.  Looking at their picture exhibition was poignant.  I had no admiration for France’s Iraqi position, but I had to admit in their defense, that neither did I have photos of our house in rubble.)

     But back to the current France.  What should conservatives admire about it?  First, it has a principled stand against affirmative action, which by the way, it calls with more clarity and precision than we, positive discrimination.  Their notion of equality, however imperfectly realized, cannot countenance relegating citizens to implicit statutory inferiority based on race or ethnicity.  Most Americans, on the other hand, think this is just the ticket.

     Secondly, the French government may not, by law, keep records of race or ethnicity.  Anyone who finds it chilling that our own government wants us to fill in little boxes about our racial identity should find this admirably idealistic. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the late American notion that rights inhere in the individual and not in one’s ethnic pedigree.  Conservatives should be appalled at the American penchant for racial tabulation and salute the French for their revulsion to it.

     For a conservative, then, France has the theory right and the practice wrong, while America has the theory wrong, but things seem to be working better in practice.  Doesn’t this discredit the conservative non-racialist approach altogether?  Not necessarily, for America is partially saved from its odious racial scorekeeping by the very thing that prevents France’s more laudable approach from flowering, namely, their separate economies.

     America’s economy is so fluid, so large, so entrepreneurial and meritocratic relative to France’s, it can accommodate and eventually welcome almost anyone with the requisite will.  France’s more constrained economy, on the other hand, tends to stifle growth, buffer the entrenched bourgeoisie and bar newcomers.  A well-meant socialist welfare system that physically separates the poor from the mainstream only makes things worse.

      It would be nice if we could have their philosophic clarity and they could have our economic dynamism.  There is no doubt real prejudice and discrimination among the French and one hopes that they will address it, but without abandoning their strictly non-racialist ideal.  Whatever its sins and eccentricities, France at least aspires to a colorblind civic life while we in the U.S. meanly cling to patronizing notions of minority exceptionalism.

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