[LINK] Dreams deferred

[rfmcdonald]

David A. Bell's The New Republic article "Why the French Forgot How to Assimilate" examines the question of why the French melting pot isn't working, really isn't working.

To the smoke rising from the Paris suburbs, the American press has been adding a generous portion of fog. Typical was the front-page story in last Friday's New York Times. A "significant proportion of the population," Craig S. Smith wrote, "has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair." Put simply, this is distressingly close to nonsense, and not just because berets have been far more scarce on French streets than baseball caps for many years. What Smith and the many American journalists who have repeated such ideas for the last few weeks have not reported is that France has been a multiethnic country for a very long time, and, for decades, it did as well as any other Western country--including the United States--at integrating large numbers of immigrants into its society. The problem that has literally burst into flames this year is not that France has an innate inability to integrate ethnic groups, but rather that its method for integrating them no longer works.

Bell argues that the missionary urge to assimilate as many people as possible into the French republican nation, from provincials in the metropole to colonial subjects overseas has faded, leaving stranded the members of some immigrant communities. He doesn't see much chance of a revival of this missionary zeal, given the collapse of French republican ideology after the traumas of the mid-20th century.