PARIS – A powerful government minister recently condemned him as an organization whose activities are racist and can lead to “fascism”. Lawmakers accused him of promoting “separatism” and of aligning himself with “Islam-leftism” before demanding its dissolution.
France’s university student union, Unef, has a long history of attracting the ire of the political establishment – especially over the years, when it lobbied for the independence of the country’s most important colony, Algeria, or took to the streets against the contract. work for young people.
But the recent severe attacks have focused on something that resonates so deeply in a France that struggles to adapt to social change: its practice of limiting some meetings to racial minorities to discuss discrimination.
In the past few days, the controversy over Unef – its French acronym for France’s National Student Union – has spread to a third week, merging with larger explosive debates shaking the country.
On Thursday, the Senate approved a ban on the group and others organizing restricted meetings, attaching an “Unef amendment” to President Emmanuel Macron’s law against Islam, a political ideology that the government blames for inspiring recent terrorist attacks. The National Assembly, controlled by Macron’s party, has yet to ratify the bill, which must be one of the legislative pieces defining his presidency.
At the same time, the campaign before the next regional elections was turned upside down when Audrey Pulvar, a black deputy mayor of Paris and a high-profile candidate, drew widespread condemnation after defending the restricted meetings.
Student union leaders advocate the use of “safe space” forums, saying that they have generated frank and powerful conversations; critics say the exclusion equates to racism against whites and is an American-inspired betrayal of France’s universalist tradition.
For its critics, Unef is the incarnation of the threat from American universities – importing ideas that fundamentally challenge relations between women and men, question the role of race and racism in France and disturb society’s hierarchies of power.
There is no doubt that in recent years the union has undergone the kind of deep and rapid transformation rarely seen in a country where institutions tend to be deeply conservative and some, such as the French Academy or literary award juries, are structured in ways that stifle changes .
The union’s transformation reflected widespread changes among young French people who have much more relaxed attitudes towards gender, race, sexual orientation and, as recent research has shown, France’s religion and strict secularism, known as laïcité.
Unef’s change – some hope and others fear – may presage greater social change.
“We frighten people because we represent the future, ” said Mélanie Luce, 24, president of Unef and the daughter of a black woman from Guadalupe and a Jewish man from the south of France.
In an organization dominated by white men until a few years ago, Unef’s current leadership shows a diversity rarely seen in France. Mrs. Luce is only her fifth female president and the first non-white woman. Its four other leaders include two white men, a woman whose parents converted to Islam and a Muslim man whose parents immigrated from Tunisia.
“Unef is a microcosm that reveals the debates in society,” said Lilâ Le Bas, former president. This debate in France is just beginning to address issues like serious discrimination, she said, “and that is why it crystallizes so many tensions and pressures.”
Like other student unions, Unef operates with government grants, about $ 540,000 a year in this case. Among its duties, it addresses the living conditions of students, recently organizing, for example, food banks for students hard hit by the coronavirus epidemic.
But their increasingly outspoken social positions have drawn criticism from the political establishment, the conservative media and even some former members.
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former Unef leaders, including all seven presidents in the past 20 years, not even they felt uniformly comfortable with Unef’s recent positions, which put anti-discrimination at the forefront. center of your mission.
Its new focus, critics say, has led to a decline in union influence and membership – once the largest, but now the second largest in France. Supporters say that, unlike many other left-wing organizations in France, the union has a new and clear vision.
In 2019, in a protest against blackface, Unef leaders helped prevent the staging of a piece of Aeschylus at the Sorbonne to denounce the use of masks and dark makeup by white actors, leading to accusations of violation of freedom of expression.
More recently, local authorities in Grenoble posted anonymous campus posters on social media that included the names of two teachers accused of Islamophobia; Ms. Luce later called this a mistake, but many politicians brandished it as evidence of Unef’s “Islamic leftism” or sympathy for Islam.
The attacks reached a new level last month after Luce was questioned in a radio interview about Unef’s practice of holding meetings limited to racial minorities.
A decade ago, Unef leaders started meetings exclusively for women, in which members spoke for the first time about sexism and sexual harassment in the organization. Since then, discussions have extended to racism and other forms of internal discrimination.
Ms. Luce explained to her radio announcer that no decisions were made at the restricted meetings, which were used to allow women and racial minorities to share common experiences of discrimination. But the interview led to a flood of sexist and racist deaths threats.
On a subsequent radio interview of his authorship, the minister of national education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, agreed with the characterization of the host of the restricted meetings as racists.
“People who claim to be progressive and who, by asserting themselves, distinguish people by the color of their skin are taking us to things that resemble fascism,” said Blanquer.
Blanquer led the government’s broader reaction against what he and conservative intellectuals describe as the threat of American progressive ideas about race, gender and postcolonialism.
France’s cultural wars have heated up as Macron shifts to the right to defend himself from an imminent challenge from the far right ahead of next year’s elections. His government recently announced that it would investigate universities for “left-wing Islamic” trends that “corrupt society.”
Now, even relatively obscure terms in social theory like “intersectionality” – an analysis of multiple and reinforcing forms of discrimination – are attracting ferocious attacks by politicians.
“There is a battle going on against an intellectual matrix that comes from American universities and from intersectoral theories established in the essentialization of communities and identities,” Blanquer said in an interview with a French newspaper.
Blanquer refused requests for an interview, as did Frédérique Vidal, the minister of higher education.
Aurore Bergé, a legislator for Macron’s party, said that Unef’s actions lead to identity policies that, instead of uniting people in a common cause, exclude everyone except “those who suffer discrimination”.
“We are expelling others as if they have no right to expression,” said Bergé, who recently unsuccessfully introduced an amendment that would prohibit Muslim minors from wearing the veil in public.
Current Unef leaders say that by focusing on discrimination, they are fighting for French ideals of freedom, equality and human rights.
They see the recent attacks as rearguard moves by an establishment that refuses to face discrimination deeply rooted in France, fails to cope with the growing diversity of its society and extends universalism to silence new ideas and voices, out of fear.
“It is a problem that, in our society, in the country of the Enlightenment, we restrict ourselves from talking about certain issues,” said Majdi Chaarana, Unef treasurer and son of Tunisian immigrants.
As the student union has boldly expressed itself, Unef’s influence, like that of other left-wing organizations – including the Socialist Party, of which it has long been an ally, and labor unions – has diminished, said Julie Le Mazier, a specialist in student unions at the European Center for Sociology and Political Science.
“It is a major crisis, but it is not specific to Unef,” she said.
Bruno Julliard led the union when he forced an incumbent president, Jacques Chirac, to withdraw a contested youth employment contract in 2006. At that time, the union was more concerned with issues such as tuition and access to jobs, said Julliard, the first openly. gay union president.
Julliard said that restricted union meetings and his opposition to Aeschylus’ play made him uncomfortable, but that young people are now “much more sensitive, in the good sense of the word”, to all forms of discrimination.
“We have to let each generation lead their battles and respect the way they do it, although that doesn’t stop me from having an opinion,” he said.
William Martinet, a former president, said the focus on gender eventually led to an examination of racism. While Unef’s top leaders tended to be economically comfortable white men from France’s “grande écoles”, or prestigious universities, many of its grassroots activists were from the working class, immigrants and non-white backgrounds.
“After you put on glasses that allow you to see the discrimination, in fact, there is a crowd that appears before you,” said Martinet.
Once started, the change happened quickly. More women became leaders. Abdoulaye Diarra, who said he became Unef’s first black vice president in 2017, recruited a woman wearing a hijab whose parents converted to Islam, Maryam Pougetoux, now one of the union’s two vice presidents.
“I don’t think that if I had arrived 10 years earlier, I would have felt as welcome as in 2017,” said Pougetoux.
But the reception was very different from the outside.
Last fall, when Pougetoux, wearing a hijab, appeared at the National Assembly to testify about the impact of the Covid epidemic on students, four lawmakers, including one from Macron’s party, came out in protest.
The use of the Muslim veil has fueled divisions in France for more than a generation. But for Unef, the issue was now resolved.
Its leaders had long considered the veil to be a symbol of female oppression. Now they saw it simply as a choice left to women.
“To really defend the condition of women,” said Adrien Liénard, the other vice president, “is really to give them the right to do what they want.”