For several months now, a concept has become popular in the public debate and continues to make headlines: “Islamo-leftism”. A number of personalities and movements, often from the left, have taken it on their own. Immigration, vector of “cultural insecurity” (pseudoscientific formula to designate what Jacques Chirac called more prosaically “The noise and the smell”) and the affirmation of the Muslim faith, which would of course be linked, would be threats to the Republic and its universalism. Or for France and its national identity? In reality, in the mouths of these promoters, these notions have become synonymous.
The major social and political phenomenon of recent years is not so much the affirmation of some kind of “Islamo-leftism”, as that of a “nativist” ideology which, coming from the United States, now crosses the whole of the world. West. What a paradox that those who constantly denounce the importation of American concepts are nevertheless the first to provide them! Because if the field of postcolonial or race studies and their possible political translations remain totally marginal in France, “nativism” is wreaking havoc and has imposed itself in a very large part of the political landscape, including on the left and In the center.
Blood and soil rights
But what is “nativism”? Quite simply, the idea that the longer your presence and that of your family are in a country, the more rights you have there. It is in his name, for example, that we can legitimize the deprivation of nationality for binational criminals. These, considered less French because most often not having obtained their nationality by blood law or by a more recent land law, can for the same acts and unlike their compatriots, have it withdrawn. .
This is also why the Muslim religion, whose presence in France is less ancient than those of other monotheisms, has fewer rights. The law to “reinforce the republican principles”, in reality to control more certain associations or places of worship, only targets structures or practices linked to Islam, not that of other religions and ideologies, which can nevertheless also operate on the basis of unequal principles, as Gérald Darmanin and Marlène Schiappa have repeatedly stated, when Marine Le Pen or Republican tenors questioned them on this subject and demanded that this be explicitly written into the law.
This is also the reason why we accept, in the inner suburbs of Paris in particular, that certain departments are chronically under-provided with public services. In 2018, the Cornut-Gentille and Kokouendo report, named after the two LREM parliamentarians who carried it out, on the evaluation of the State’s action in the exercise of three of its central missions (education, police and justice) in Seine-Saint-Denis, is without appeal: it points to a State “unequal and unsuitableIn this department.
Parliamentarians also recall that in terms of public action, the “Policies specific to priority neighborhoods”, highly highlighted politically and mediatically, have served as a lure: because “Common law policies are not respected and are well below those implemented in the rest of the country” and that the abysmal understaffing of civil servants is unjustifiable.
Peripheral France and “nativist” theory
However, Seine-Saint-Denis is also the French department with the highest immigrant population, which represents 29% of its total inhabitants. This is obviously not a coincidence and yet directly contradicts the theses in vogue and popularized by the geographer Christophe Guilluy, all of “nativist” inspiration, on a peripheral France which would be less well treated than the hyper-urbanized suburbs and which could be summed up as follows: let’s defend the rights of those who were there before.
To justify these inequalities and paralyze any desire to reduce them, some even defend the idea that even if they would have grown up here, the last generations of immigration, having been raised “In hatred of France”, would in any case be irretrievably lost. Thus, while the National Rally is making efforts to be more inclusive (Marine Le Pen recently replied to Gérald Darmanin on a TV set that no, contrary to what he said, there was no particular problem with Islam) the neo-republican movement is more and more imbued with “nativist” ideology, which it nevertheless always seeks to disguise as universalism.
This is the reason why many French people, with or without an immigrant background, will no longer go to “stand in the way” (in order to get out of what they have considered for too long as hypocrisy, some are even resolved to vote for her). They will refuse to vote for political figures of whom they consider (as many already suspect, Emmanuel Macron could be confronted with it in 2022) that they have already ceded the essentials to him.
The challenge is sizeable, but to have the slightest chance of coming together in 2022 and stopping this moral and political disaster, all humanists must now clarify their relationship to “nativism” and send it back to where it would never have been. had to get out: from the ideological bins of the far right.
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