When and how did the French become French?

The protests that turned France into a scene of fire over the past week have inevitably put the immigrant question on the agenda everywhere and on every ground, albeit in different contexts and with different concerns. Turkey also received its share of this agenda.

An event on this scale has dimensions that call on everyone to take a lesson. In fact, such events also provide an opportunity for people to see their own mistakes and correct them, and to set themselves in order. But more often than not these opportunities are trampled on a ground where people let no dust touch themselves and do not allow even a hair to be removed from their noses.

Some hasty assessments, and staying within rote formulas pulled down from memory and repeated, can cause certain opportunities to be wasted. For example, we say that these protests emerged as a reaction against French racism, but what kind of race is being invoked when racism is practiced in France is often overlooked.

The truth of the matter is that the French nation has for centuries been a population basin constantly fed by different immigrant peoples coming from Africa and the Middle East, and by way of Europe from Central Asia and the Northern lands, and which was also blended, not exclusively but to a large extent, with the flow of the Germanic population at its origin. That is, the immigrant population of North African, Arab or generally African origin that we see in France today is not merely an event of today. Throughout history, this population has, almost periodically, poured its own blood, race, culture and language into the Frankish population in the geography where France is located. So much so that in the dough formed in total, no possibility remains of identifying any physical characteristic that could be called characteristic of the French.

Even so, today we can speak of a French identity, of a nationality and, on that basis, of a nationalism. The racism practiced in the name of this nationalism has no real basis. In France race is a sheer superstition, and in fact those who know the business know that this is so.

The truth is that France is the place where the nation-forming project that spread to the whole world after the French Revolution was written, and its first implementation was carried out on this soil. A project to produce a nation out of countless ethnic groups and communities that were exceedingly mixed, distant from one another and, to that same degree, close to one another.

This is the place where the widely repeated error that nations give birth to states must be corrected. Here it is not the nation that gives birth to the state but the state that gives birth to the nation. This reality, which historians such as Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm demonstrated very well, is told even more strikingly by the famous French historian Eugen Weber in the example of the formation of the French nation, identity and society.

Of course, contrary to the historical thesis produced after the formation of the French nation-state, he explains that before 1870 there was no single and indivisible French nation.

The strong national consciousness and the racism directed at foreigners that we see among the French today are therefore in fact a racism without a foundation. Here there are perhaps some attributions of meaning that require us to carry out a political hermeneutics of racism: what does Frenchness represent in this nationalist discourse? Whom do foreigners represent, and what does the arrogance and feeling of privilege directed at them express?

In fact, among the people who came as immigrants in history and settled in these lands, one can distinguish the Basque people, who live in an isolated area west of the Pyrenees in France and whose origin cannot be determined. Yet this people, who are more native to France, are again a target of discriminatory racism both for France and for Spain.

According to Weber's thesis, before 1870 there is not one France but many Frances. There is not a single mother tongue but many mother tongues, many historical memories, and peasants with countless cultural formations. These peasants consisted of people very distant from one another both in historical development and in cultural formation. In this way Weber, whose book is titled "Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France" (Heretik Yayınları, Turkish translation by Çağdaş Sümer, Ankara, 2017), explains how a French nation was created, out of countless cultural, ethnic and cultural formations, through the institutional devices of the state apparatus.

Within society there are distances that seem very insurmountable between the very developed and the very backward, the very civilized and the very savage, the very clean and the very dirty, those who speak a noble language and those who speak incomprehensible dialects. But these distances, as a result of what was implemented from 1870 onward, also offered the world, as a model, the nation-state and the techniques of nation formation by which everyone would feel French.

With the policies implemented from this time onward, these spatial and temporal distances were closed through the institutions of school, road and military service, the countryside was modernized and civilized, and everyone who did not see himself as French ended up beginning to see himself as French.

Weber compares this assimilation model that France applied to its own people with the assimilation model it applied in Algeria. The basis of the comparison is the Algeria that Frantz Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth. It is the effort to assimilate the native peoples, who were seen as barbarian and savage, into civilization and Frenchness. To alienate those peoples from themselves and make them ashamed of themselves. Although this assimilation did not take hold in Algeria, it did in France. The reason, of course, is quite simple: in Algeria this was being done directly by foreign occupiers and colonizers. Even if they were able to create a mass attached to themselves, they could have no chance of succeeding with society.

Whereas in France, assimilation carried out against one's own people takes hold, because the one doing it is, after all, "one of their own." Resistance to it has been broken from within. Here assimilation was not only imposed by force and from above; the peasants also bought the advantages these policies offered them and in return gave up their own cultures, even their identities.

There was of course no nation-state without violence, in Anthony Giddens's words, but where the violence was applied from, how, and on the basis of what legitimacy, has also mattered.

Do those who practice racism in the name of France know what they are doing? Whom are they excluding in the name of which race? Over whom, and in the name of what kind of race, are they putting on airs of superiority? What are they after? How is racism being constructed and put forward in order to conceal a sense of privilege or real privileges?

These are questions that need to be asked and traced.