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NASSERA Benmarnia and her husband, Nouredine Hagoug, both French-born of Algerian descent, both in their late thirties, are looking for a solution to the Muslim community's problems that doesn't rely solely on throwing money and low-rent housing at people like them. Their Union of Muslim Families, near Marseille's cathedral, a mile up the Canebi�re from the docks, focuses on charity, cultural values, and informal cooperation, rather than on political activism. I visited them recently in a crumbling ground-floor office where screw-in sheet-metal shelves were covered with discarded sweaters and French textbooks bound for Algeria. A sign read DO SOMETHING FOR THE NEEDY -- INCH'ALLAH!

Benmarnia and Hagoug are devout; they are bringing their children up to speak and write Arabic as well as French. Benmarnia was educated in a Catholic school, but she told me that she would send her two sons to a French Islamic school if she could. She's not alone. A 1995 Harris poll showed that 76 percent of Muslims in France would prefer to send their children to religious schools under state supervision, an option currently available to Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, but not to Muslims.

Like virtually all believing Muslims in France, Benmarnia and Hagoug are preoccupied with the position of Islam under the country's 1905 law regarding the separation of Church and State. It was passed by a secularist government in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, when a backlash set in against the Catholic Church's role in fanning the anti-Semitism that was made evident by the wrongful conviction, for treason, of the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus. The law banned state funding of religious institutions. For a long time it was so strictly interpreted that it seemed virtually to declare nonbelief as the state religion; for much of the century professing Catholics were informally barred from serving in the French cabinet. The law has generally been praised by the left and reviled by the right -- so it is ironic that an immigrant group practicing a minority religion is now intent on overturning, or at least modifying, a law intended to prevent France from turning into a Catholic theocracy.

At the time the law was passed, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish institutions already had a wealth of buildings and facilities and assets, and they retain them to this day. What's more, a number of those holy buildings were linked to "cultural associations," which the state continues to fund generously. Muslims have no such assets, and their religious traditions make it harder for them to use the political arena to obtain any. Islam doesn't have a hierarchical clergy the way the Catholic Church does. Nor can the Muslims of France, drawn from various countries and religious traditions, form community institutions as easily as, say, the mostly indigenous Jewish population can. The sociologist Franck Fr�gosi, of CNRS Strasbourg, a national center for scientific research, draws out the comparison rather starkly: France's 45 million Catholics have 40,000 cathedrals, churches, and chapels. Its 900,000 Protestants have 957 houses of worship. Its 500,000 Jews have eighty-two synagogues and large oratories. Its four million Muslims have eight formal mosques (some count 1,600 mosques, but many of these are better described as informal prayer rooms in cellars or spare workrooms). There are Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish -- but no Muslim -- chaplains in the French army.

"La gestion publique de l'islam en France : enjeux g�opolitiques, h�ritage colonial et/ou logique r�publicaine?", by Franck Fr�gosi (May 10, 2000)
A consideration (in French) of how to address the question of the growth of Islam within France. Posted by the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain.

Benmarnia is intent on making the Muslim presence in France normal, regular, nonsymbolic. Ultimately, the couple's mission is not so much about separatist claims as about family values. This leads one to wonder if they recognize any commonality with William Bennett and other American conservatives. "We're not the Moral Majority," Hagoug says with a laugh. But when asked if the primary problem is a secularized France with little concern for protecting the interests of families, he nods. "That's it!"

To an American, what's most interesting about Hagoug is his extreme patience in talking about subjects that elicit strident rage in the United States. He loves Marseille, but thinks that a certain amount of racism may be part of its warp and woof. "The identity of the Marseillais," he says, "is often formed by striking out at the last to arrive." He admits that taxi drivers in Marseille are notably xenophobic, but adds that it is possible to negotiate with them; in the mid-1980s their union even petitioned for a loosening of visa requirements for Algerians, worrying that the government's crackdown on immigration was curtailing tourist revenues. In his opposition to a xenophobic politics that would permanently eliminate any room for such negotiations, though, Hagoug is uncompromising. "A National Front victory," he says, "locally or nationally, would be a mortal wound to Marseille."

IT may be in the fascistic National Front that the most surprising shift in attitudes toward Arabs has taken place. During the European elections of 1998 Samuel Mar�chal, the party's director of communications (and son-in-law of its founder and leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen), addressed what he called the "multi-denominational" aspect of France. The National Front, he said, would continue to battle against "clandestine" immigration and to back the deportation of new arrivals who were criminals, but it now favored reaching out to Islam. It would continue to oppose the foreign financing of mosques, but would be in favor of changing the law of 1905 in order to ensure French government funding for them. In fact, the National Front is "absolutely" in favor of Muslims' building mosques, so long as they're not "cathedral mosques," with minarets and other symbols on display in ways that might provoke other religions. When the National Front adjutant Bruno M�gret broke with Le Pen over this and other issues, the movement split in two.

At least that's the way a young Front spokesman named Thomas Lagane explained it to me, from his desk in Le Paquebot, the party's boat-shaped headquarters, which looms over the Seine in Saint-Cloud, just west of Paris. Lagane is a sort of immigrant himself, having been born in the Central African Republic, formerly a French colony, in 1968. With me he went even further than Mar�chal has gone publicly, arguing that France's minorities should be flocking to the National Front. "It's wrong to say that France has a single unique culture," he said. "In fact, the National Front is the movement in France that best defends multiculturalism. Let me explain. In your country especially there is a sort of destructive cultural imperialism, a global standardization of behavior, consumption, habits of thought, economic philosophy, that is causing European peoples to lose their identity. In defending our national identity we are protecting difference against standardization. The Islamic people loses its identity through the same process. We hope Muslims keep their roots, and don't try to integrate at the expense of them."

Lagane admitted that globalization has its merits. He should: he wears a stylish tattersall shirt, smokes Marlboro Lights, and does his writing on a brand-new Macintosh G3 laptop. (In fact, he left the Front just weeks after our talk, to start his own dot-com company.)"We're not against globalization," he said. "We're against a globalism that destroys the family and the nation." Certainly the National Front has changed since the early 1980s, when it tried to mix Reagan-Thatcher capitalism with a vociferous opposition to the then-prevalent high levels of immigration. The turning point seems to have been the Gulf War, in 1991, even today a staple of Le Pen's oratory, after which the movement adopted a virulently anti-capitalist stance and began to rail against American "imperialism," both economic and cultural. The new National Front seems to view Arabs as natural allies in a struggle against globalism, which it has traditionally viewed as American and Jewish. The Front is not against Israel, Lagane said (rather implausibly), only against its role, in cooperation with America, as policeman in the Middle East; what's more, he was heartened that "the Jewish community is evolving: it's now less viscerally led by left-wing Jews." He sounded almost like an old-style anti-American in his assurances that "the National Front has no quarrel with the American people."

It's doubtful that we need fear a National Front foreign policy from France anytime soon. But there are disquieting signs all the same. Last February Lionel Jospin visited Jerusalem, where he described Hezbollah guerrilla actions as "terrorist attacks." The ensuing criticism from Arab countries was not as extraordinary as his abandonment by the French left, which had theretofore been urging Jospin to try harder to wrest control of France's foreign policy from President Chirac. The growing weight of the Arab vote in France may be leaving French politicians precious little foreign-policy leeway. If so, that would help to explain why Chirac was the only Western head of state to attend the funeral of the Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad, in June.

IT'S hard to say how much of France's new cosmopolitanism is due to immigration and how much simply to globalization. If there's a Zidane effect, there's also a Michael Jordan effect. "Today," says the political reporter Blandine Grosjean, of the daily national newspaper Lib�ration, "assimilation means getting not a beret but a casquette am�ricaine" -- as the French have come to call those cheap and omnipresent baseball caps. France has always been full of foreigners, but in the past they were foreigners intent on becoming French and joining the world's leading culture. Interest in foreign lands was a matter for elite scholars and exoticists. Now Paris is becoming more like New York -- the kind of place where one is always able to get good food from many cultures. It was apparent in France by the 1980s that North African couscous had outstripped both rice and potatoes as the country's favorite accompaniment to meat, to become, arguably, the national food of France. Whole streets all over Paris are lined with couscous shops.

"The Spirit of Cotonou," by Cullen Murphy (January 1997)
Finally, some helpful advice to the French on how to enhance the role of their language in the world.

France operates under constitutional traditions that cause it to move much more cautiously than the United States in fixing racial disparities. It's the Interior Minister who is charged with ensuring harmony among citizens, and every Interior Minister of the 1990s has had an Islam policy. Jean-Pierre Chev�nement, the Interior Minister from 1997 until his resignation in late August, went further than most. An ideological man, systematic in a way that is pleasing to the French, Chev�nement broke with Mitterrand when the latter turned right on economics in the early 1980s. His initiative on Islam, which was signed with the support of four Islamic federations, was firmly grounded in the very French idea of citoyennet�. Literally, that's just "citizenship," but it's a more concrete idea in France than in the United States. It carries associations with voting rights, civic participation, cultural assimilation, and absolute equality under the law.

Chev�nement tailored his initiative so that it answered at least some of the questions everyone was asking. Along with Claude All�gre, the former Minister of Education, he called for the creation of an Institute of Islamic Studies. This institute would help to create a political lobbying organization among France's disparate and contentious Muslim subpopulations, along the lines of the country's long-standing Protestant Federation. Chev�nement urged extending voting rights for noncitizens who have been resident in France for ten years, calling it merely a necessary consequence of the Maastricht agreement that brought France into the European Union. Parts of the initiative will prove to be either gimmicks or brilliant ways of finding loopholes in the 1905 law that France now finds cumbersome. Typical is a tax on halal meat to fund mosques. And in a way that would have quelled the National Front's fears of looming minarets, Chev�nement asked Muslims to "integrate the construction of their mosques into the landscape of our cities."

THE person responsible for coordinating Chev�nement's policies among ministries for much of his tenure was Patrick Quinqueton, a longtime politician in the Movement of Citizens party. Quinqueton, now a high-ranking official in France's National Police, is a straight shooter with a scholarly bearing and an Abe Lincoln beard. He has long hoped that Chev�nement's idea of "citizenship" will cure a lot of ills. "It used to be that access to French nationality was simple," Quinqueton told me last year at the Interior Ministry. He was referring to the short residency requirements -- relative to those in other European countries -- for settlers seeking French citizenship. "But access to society didn't follow as simply. These [second-generation] young people are today the object of discrimination, in work and in housing -- not always as the result of racism." That sounds like a very fine distinction, but he explained: "You can't call this discrimination against immigrants, because in fact they're not immigrants at all. What we look for is access to citoyennet�."

Quinqueton rejected affirmative action out of hand. "Thinking about these issues poses that question immediately," he told me. "But we've made the choice not to install such a system. Absolutely not. France's political and social system -- very much attached to the principle of equality -- wouldn't accept it. Whatever gives the impression that positions are getting handed out on some basis other than merit winds up shocking people. It provokes other sorts of problems." Yet Quinqueton made the Clintonlike stipulation that the police, for instance, should "look like their communities."

The French state will be under increasing pressure to institute something like affirmative action, even if it comes under a different name. Last May, on the eve of a "black peoples' march" demanding, among other things, more representation in the media, the Minister of Communications, Catherine Tasca, ordered two national television stations, France 2 and France 3, to "more fully take into consideration the diversity of the French population." The French constitutional provision against advancing racial groups seems to be weakening. Although hard quotas are out, soft quotas have arrived, bringing with them a paradox: there is no government program more American than affirmative action, and Americanization is something that everyone in the society -- from Socialists to conservatives, from Communists to the National Front -- professes to dread.

The big problem is finding a way for the state to respect different religions and cultures without turning itself into an engine of de-assimilation. Fortunately or unfortunately, this problem is new to Europe, and the model for all such racial reconciliations tends to be the one that came out of the American civil-rights movement. Nouredine Hagoug says, "The cardinal mistake was to think of immigration uniquely as an importing of labor. That is, not to consider that these were also human beings, forming families and bringing children into the world. And these things manifestly weren't thought out. A policy built around low-qualification, low-pay labor may have been a good one in the 1970s. But now France is discovering that what it thought of as merchandise turns out to be human beings."

Copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; November 2000; The Crescent and the Tricolor - 00.11 (Part Two); Volume 286, No. 5; page 20-34.