Broken Republic

The spectacle of the ceremony, directed by left-wing artist Thomas Jolly, was not well received by everyone. The tableau of Marie Antoinette outraged the reactionary right, and the drag performance was interpreted in conservative quarters as a decadent provocation to Christian morality (they argued it was an offensive parody of the Last Supper).

Macron, too, appeared displeased. He had broadly gotten his way — the ceremony spread out across the socially cleansed city and took place largely on the now bathable Seine — but the progressive character of the display seemed to irk the man who had just spent an election campaign denouncing the Left as “immigrationist” and losing to them anyway.

This France — with a completely fractured political landscape in which the disordered logic of the unloved Fourth Republic has reconstituted itself within the Fifth, at once radical and reactionary, and with a domineering establishment sneering from on high — is the subject of Nabila Ramdani’s new book, Fixing France. Ramdani’s work is a diagnosis of the problems of contemporary France that discusses, in the words of its subtitle, “how to repair a broken republic.”

Ramdani was born in a Paris banlieue to Algerian parents and has worked as a journalist in France and the Middle East, during which she has met much of the French political establishment, including presidents Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, and now Macron. Her background heavily informs her analysis, to the benefit of the argument.

Passages of memoir illuminate the experience of growing up as an ethnic minority in the 91, a former slum dwelling of workers from France’s former colonies turned council estate. According to Ramdani, it was built with a “utopian” impulse but has ended up becoming an “all-seeing panopticon.”

She describes feeling like an outsider while discovering “enormous potholes in my country’s national story.” Her goal in the book is to fill in these potholes, and this outsider perspective ensures considerable success in doing so.

Filling in the Potholes

Politicians and journalists have exploited successive brutal jihadist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices, the Bataclan concert hall, and individuals such as the teacher Samuel Paty to scapegoat Muslims as a collective group and poison French political discourse. In their version of events, France was a harmonious land before the Muslims came with their savagery.

Ramdani, with her interest in Algeria and the Middle East as well as France, meticulously corrects this misleading picture. Terrorism, she shows, was not an import from elsewhere, and was used at times by white French people and indeed the state itself.

The Secret Army Organization (OAS) was a far-right terrorist organization formed during the Algerian war of independence under the direction of high-ranking military officials who had broken with Charles de Gaulle when he began to contemplate withdrawal from Algeria. Some of those figures would go on to prominent roles in the Rassemblement National. As well as killing hundreds of Algerian civilians and attempting to assassinate de Gaulle, the OAS was responsible for a series of attacks on French soil, including the bombing of a train in Vitry-le-François in 1961, which killed twenty-eight people.

The latter incident was effectively sent down the memory hole; people only started to ask questions about the “attack which never happened” in 2015, following Bataclan. Ramdani scathingly condemns this deliberate amnesia, as well as the assassination campaigns carried out in Algeria by the French state, as “textbook examples of how French establishment figures backed terrorism as an effective political tool.”

The chapter on terrorism is the book’s most significant contribution. Ramdani bravely questions why there has not been sufficient investigation into the events of 2015, including the possibility that friendly fire from panicked police may have contributed to the carnage. She then clinically deconstructs the myth that suggests that the attackers were imported enemy combatants who installed themselves in French society to make war on it.

In fact, she insists, these suicide bombers were mentally ill “losers” who came from “damaged criminal backgrounds,” not trained ISIS super-soldiers, and French society itself bore considerable responsibility for the production of such attacks. She forcefully and persuasively ties the French establishment to this terrorism, highlighting its political and diplomatic support for the Saudi government, not to mention the actions of the concrete company Lafarge, which paid ISIS to keep one of its factories running. Her zeal in deconstructing the narrative around terrorism in France is admirable, and she pulls it off convincingly.

Center and Periphery

Ramdani’s approach throughout the book is cultural-historical. At times this is highly fruitful, as in her discussion of the geography of the Parisian banlieues, and the way that marginalization and exploitation of the residents is literally built into the city:

There are transport links with the center of Paris from the 91, but they do not work very well, despite being full of cleaners and manual workers from the estates in the very early morning. The TGV high-speed trains can get you from Paris to Marseille in under three and a half hours, or to London in not much more than two, but nobody wants inhabitants of the estates sneaking into Paris at any kind of speed. All they get is dirty, unreliable old trains on lines like the RER D, which is nicknamed the “D-for-Delinquent” line.

At times, however, this largely cultural mode of critique suffers from a dearth of political economy. In the chapter on education, Ramdani attributes the failures of the education system to a typical French conservatism, focusing on handwriting and bourgeois education. She presents teachers as lazy, unwilling, empty vehicles for a “Black Hussar” ideology of conservative pedagogy.

The French education system, Ramdani writes, is a way for

elite intellectuals to impose their culture — which, they believe, should be the only one available — and treat anything that challenges it as trash. A good way to start improving the situation would be to encourage teachers to teach, rather than to simply impart knowledge with a sour face.

While the dominance of bourgeois culture is undeniable, this portrait of the French education system is too much of a sweeping generalization. In my own brief experience in the Education National, I encountered plenty of teachers who were working hard to try and engage difficult students in creative ways. The main problems they faced in doing so were large class sizes, a crushing administrative burden, insufficient resources, long hours during term time, and relatively low pay.

Ramdani does briefly allude to these issues, but she quickly returns to a grand cultural-historical narrative that ignores the more mundane politics of austerity and the neoliberal gutting of education. This is the worst example of the cultural generalizations, but the appeal to the idea of national character throughout the book sometimes serves to smooth over contradictions and differences, presenting a unified French essence where there is none.

Pulling Punches

Ramdani is unsparing as she details the sins of France’s political establishment, from Macron’s playing up to far-right themes and the brutality of the police under his rule to the cynicism, greed, and violence underpinning much of the country’s foreign policy over the course of decades. However, she sometimes shies away from some of the obvious conclusions to draw from the narrative corrections that she makes.

For example, those on the left wing of French political discourse argue that Macron does not merely play up to the far right occasionally through political convenience but rather does so as an ongoing and active part of his project. “Macrono-Lepenism” is the term coined to describe this phenomenon. Yet Ramdani does not engage with this argument, even though her own book provides ample evidence of such ideological convergence between Macron and Marine Le Pen.

Ramdani’s conscious outsider status provides much-needed perspective on a variety of issues, including race, identity, and feminism as well as the nature of protest and policing and the potholed historical story that France tells itself. Yet as a high-flying journalist, she sometimes replicates the structural biases of the industry that she works in.

The scarcity of references to the populist left are indicative in this respect. French politics and media are increasingly structured in a way that suppresses the Left, chiefly represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, La France Insoumise, and the country’s labor unions, preferring to focus almost entirely on the pseudo-conflict between Macronism and the far right. A book purporting to try and fix France could go some way toward this goal by rejecting this suppression and acknowledging the alternatives that some are attempting to build.

Where the Left does get a mention, Ramdani displays another reflex of the media establishment by railing against supposedly equivalent extremisms of left and right. At one point, she writes that Macron

falls back on crony conservatism while triggering the anger of struggling workers. There is no doubt that extremist politicians such as Le Pen and Mélenchon are channelling this discontent to significant electoral success.

The problem is not that Ramdani is neither a partisan of La France Insoumise nor a fan of Mélenchon. By tarring him with the brush of extremism while excusing Macron as simply a “crony conservative,” Ramdani displays an instinct that is characteristic of the political culture she otherwise seeks to overhaul.

For reasons that are not established in the book, Ramdani does not present Macron as an extreme figure, although she correctly notes that his decisions as French president have resulted in widening inequality, adventurist imperial actions in Africa, police brutality, and the mainstreaming of far-right rhetoric.

Mélenchon, on the other hand, shares her views on Palestine and is the only major political figure proposing the wholesale refoundation of the political system under the rubric of the “Sixth Republic” that she advocates as a solution to France’s malaise, yet she depicts him as an extremist equivalent to Le Pen.

These unthinking tics of mainstream journalism somewhat undermine the argument, and certainly the propositional part of the thesis. Readers may ask themselves what is the point of calling for a Sixth Republic without giving attention to the political actors actively trying to bring it about.

As a critique of the status quo, Fixing France is generally excellent, well-researched, and cogently argued. But politics and culture are not the only things that need fixing in France today — journalism does, too. The radical critics of the status quo that come out of the industry must also, from time to time, apply the same unflinching skepticism to themselves.