PARIS – The threat is said to be existential. This fuels secessionism. It erodes national unity. Stimulates Islam. It attacks the intellectual and cultural heritage of France.
The threat? “Certain theories of social science totally imported from the United States,” said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-level intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas – specifically about race, gender, postcolonialism – are undermining their society. “There is a battle to be fought against an intellectual matrix of American universities,” warned Macron’s Education Minister.
Encouraged by these comments, prominent intellectuals have come together against what they see as contamination by the leftism beyond the control of American campuses and their culture of concomitant cancellation.
Against them is a younger and more diverse guard who considers these theories as tools to understand the obstinate blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still retreats to the mention of race, has not yet reconciled with its colonial past and often escapes concerns minorities as identity policies.
Disputes that otherwise would have attracted little attention are now exploding in the news and on social media. The new director of the Paris Opera, who said on Monday that he wants to diversify his staff and ban blackface, was attacked by far-right leader Marine Le Pen, but also at Le Monde because, although German, he had worked in Toronto and “absorbed American culture for 10 years”.
The publication this month of a critical book on racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars – and received extensive journalistic coverage. Mr Noiriel said the breed has become a “bulldozer” crushing other issues, adding, in an email, that his academic research in France was questionable because the breed is not recognized by the government and is just “subjective data”.
The heated French debate over a handful of academic disciplines on US campuses may surprise those who have witnessed the gradual decline in American influence in many corners of the world. In a way, it is a proxy struggle over some of the most inflammable issues in French society, including national identity and the division of power. In a nation where intellectuals still dominate, the stakes are high.
With its echoes of the American cultural wars, the battle started within French universities, but it is being increasingly fought in the media. Politicians are increasingly influential, especially after a turbulent year during which a series of events questioned the principles of French society.
Mass protests in France against police violence, inspired by the death of George Floyd, challenged the official rejection of race and systemic racism. A #MeToo generation of feminists confronted male power and older feminists. A widespread crackdown following a series of Islamic attacks raised questions about France’s model of secularism and the integration of immigrants from its former colonies.
Some have seen the scope of American identity politics and social science theories. Some center-right legislators pushed for a parliamentary investigation into “ideological excesses” at universities and chosen “guilty” scholars on Twitter.
Mr. Macron – who had shown little interest in these issues in the past but has been courting the law before next year’s elections – stirred up last June when he blamed universities for encouraging the “ethnicization of the social issue” – reaching “Breaking the republic in two. ”
“I was pleasantly surprised, ” said Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who last month helped create an organization against ‘decolonialism and identity politics’. Comprised of established figures, many retirees, the group issued warnings about American-inspired social theories in major publications such as Le Point and Le Figaro.
For Heinich, last year’s developments came at the top of the activism that brought foreign disputes over cultural appropriation and blackface to French universities. At the Sorbonne, activists prevented the staging of a piece by Aeschylus to protest the use of masks and dark makeup by white actors; elsewhere, some well-known speakers were rejected due to pressure from students.
“It was a series of extremely traumatic incidents for our community and they all fit into what is called a culture of cancellation,” said Heinich.
For others, the attack on perceived American influence has revealed something more: a French establishment unable to cope with a world in flux, especially at a time when the government’s incorrect treatment of the coronavirus pandemic deepened the sense of inevitable decline of a once great power.
“It is the sign of a small and frightened, declining, provincializing republic, but which in the past and even today believes in its universal mission and which therefore seeks those responsible for its decline,” said François Cusset, a specialist in American civilization at the University of Paris Nanterre.
France has long claimed a national identity, based on a common culture, fundamental rights and fundamental values such as equality and freedom, rejecting diversity and multiculturalism. The French often see the United States as a turbulent society at war with itself.
But far from being Americans, many of the leading thinkers behind theories about gender, race, post-colonialism and queer theory came from France – as well as from the rest of Europe, South America, Africa and India, said Anne Garréta, a French writer who teaches literature at universities in France and at Duke.
“It’s a whole global world of ideas that circulates, ” she said. “It turns out that the most cosmopolitan and globalized campuses at this point in history are the Americans. ”
The French state does not compile racial statistics, which is illegal, describing them as part of its commitment to universalism and the equal treatment of all citizens under the law. For many scholars of the race, however, reluctance is part of a long history of denying racism in France and the slave trade and the country’s colonial past.
“What is more French than the racial issue in a country that was built around these issues? Said Mame-Fatou Niang, who divides her time between France and the United States, where she teaches French studies at Carnegie Mellon University.
Niang led a campaign to remove a fresco at the French National Assembly, which shows two black figures with full, red lips and bulging eyes. Her public views on race have made her a frequent target on social media, including one of the lawmakers who pushed for an investigation into “ideological excesses” at universities.
Pap Ndiaye, the historian who led efforts to establish black studies in France, said it was no accident that the current wave of anti-American rhetoric began to grow at the moment when the first protests against racism and police violence took place in last June.
“There was the idea that we are talking a lot about racial issues in France,” he said. “That’s enough.”
Three Islamic attacks last fall served as a reminder that terrorism remains a threat in France. They also drew attention to another hot field of research: Islamophobia, which examines how hostility to Islam in France, rooted in its colonial experience in the Muslim world, continues to shape the lives of French Muslims.
Abdellali Hajjat, an Islamophobia expert, said it became increasingly difficult to focus on his subject after 2015, when devastating terrorist attacks hit Paris. Government funding for research has run out. Researchers on the subject have been accused of apologists for Islamists and even terrorists.
Finding the atmosphere oppressive, Hajjat left two years ago to teach at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, where he said he found greater academic freedom.
“On the issue of Islamophobia, it is only in France that there is such a violent conversation about the rejection of the term, ” he said.
Macron Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer accused universities, under American influence, of being accomplices to terrorists in providing the intellectual justification behind their actions.
A group of 100 prominent scholars wrote an open letter supporting the minister and criticizing the theories “transferred from American campuses” at Le Monde.
A signatory, Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam, said that American influence led to “a kind of prohibition in universities to think about the phenomenon of political Islam in the name of a left-wing ideology that considers it the religion of the underprivileged”.
Along with Islamophobia, it was through the “totally artificial import” into France of the “American-style black issue” that some tried to trace a false image of a France guilty of “systemic racism” and “white privilege”, ‘said Pierre- André Taguieff, a historian and an important critic of American influence.
Taguieff said in an email that researchers of race, Islamophobia and post-colonialism were motivated by a “hatred of the West, as a white civilization”.
“The common agenda of these enemies of European civilization can be summed up in three words: decolonize, unmask, de-Europeanize,” said Taguieff. “Pure white man – this is the culprit to condemn and the enemy to eliminate.”
Behind the attacks on American universities – led by white male intellectuals – are tensions in a society where power appears to be at stake, said Éric Fassin, a sociologist who was one of the first academics to focus on race and racism in France, about 15 years ago.
At that time, race scholars tended to be white like him, he said. He said he was often called a traitor and faced threats, most recently from a right-wing extremist who was sentenced to four months in jail for threatening decapitate it.
But the rise of young intellectuals – some black or Muslim – fueled the attack on what Fassin calls the “American bogeyman”.
“That’s what turned things upside down, ” he said. “They are not only the objects that we are talking about, but also the subjects that are talking about. ”