To a foreign ear like mine, the word “circle” in French is easily mistaken for the word “circus”, since only a subtle vowel and a swallowed “L” distinguish them. So, I guess it was appropriate that they chose the Cercle Foch club on Avenue Foch in the ritzy 16th arrondissement of Paris as the venue for Tuesday’s local debate on the French national identity, considering what a circus the meeting turned out to be.

Eric Besson. Photo by Adam Tinworth

I went to the Paris meeting, because I wanted to see if, as advertised, the debate was a genuine attempt to come to terms with what it means to be a nation in postindustrial 21st-century Europe, or if it was merely an excuse to motivate the right wing vote and rile up the crazies. What I found was a little of both.

Outside the meeting, a young woman expressed to me what many suspect—that it’s all a gambit by an unpopular government and its divisive Immigration Minister, Eric Besson, to change the subject in an election year and monopolize discussion. “During the Mitterand era,” she said, “The question of immigration was used by the socialists under the pretext of fighting the National Front, as a way to rally the young. Now what Besson and Sarkozy are doing is practically the same. I think it’s a political tactic.” Except this time, it’s not the young they’re trying to rally, but the older, more conservative voters who are core supporters of Mr. Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party.

An old advertisment for the Paris Winter Circus

And the 16th is prime poaching for pensioners. This mostly affluent neighborhood hasn’t really been chic since “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) was shot here, and walking around, you get the feeling that that’s when many in the neighborhood took up residence. Certainly, there was a strong contingent of dapper men in excellent coats and well-turned-out ladies in furs at the conference room next to the athletic club founded by the baron Edmond de Rothschild in this swanky 70s building. One of the crowd, a very nice lady in a cashmere hat told me, “For me, it was a very interesting debate, except that I couldn’t hear everything… it should have been more calm, that’s all.” At which point, her husband piped up, “You’re an American journalist? It’s not any worse in the United States! I lived for two years in Iowa City, Iowa. You begin elections with the Iowa caucus, and this was about the same thing!”

In fact, the meeting did have that kind of feel. Something like half the crowd were retirees, another quarter were either journalists or attached to various politicians, and the rest were a mishmash of curious citizens, cranks and activists. Mr. Besson has been running all over France conducting these little “debates”, which are really more like town hall meetings, as part of the “grand national identity debate” announced by the Sarkozy government at the end of last year.

It goes without saying that it is a huge and unwieldy topic. And immediately, it raises a more practical question: how the heck can you even talk about it in a useful way? National identity sounds a lot like a code word for nationalism, minus the inconvenient historical baggage. Call it nationalism-lite. Some critics have questioned the wisdom of holding such a discussion to begin with. An open-ended debate on a heated topic with no clearly defined endpoint seems more like a recipe for stirring up the passions, not for promoting reconciliation.

Mr. Besson, on the government website setup for the debate, offers this rather windy justification:

…the excesses of nationalism, the development of new forms of ethnic identity and regionalism, the gradual creation of the European identity, and the accelerated globalization of trade appear to some to call into question the very idea of the nation. The often-asked question, what is a nation, that it makes individuals identify themselves body and soul with people they don’t even know, seems more relevant than ever.

So, Europe, History, Globalization, Ethnic identity (read: Muslims): how to make sense of it all? Here to answer your questions is Eric Besson, the national identity impresario, waxing on about the values of the French republic and the history of French immigration. And you kinda have to admire the guy for his aplomb—the way he fielded four our five questions at a time, cherry-picking the best questions and ignoring the uncomfortable ones. He praised a young woman of North African descent who considers herself French, and simply French; fended off the tirade of an old Lebanese gentleman raised in Paris, who’s convinced they don’t even teach French history in the schools anymore; agreed with another old gentleman about the threat of the thankfully small but growing minority of French Islamists, though of course he’s at pains to distinguish them from the vast majority of French Muslims; lectures a North African gentleman (grandson of a French World War II veteran) about the fact this a post-colonial period we live in, and that it’s time to put the old colonial discourse behind us; and warmly accepted an elderly lady’s heartfelt thanks for tackling such a difficult issue.

But then the initially polite crowd grew restive. A noisy and cantankerous klatch of ulta-right wing National Front supporters hogged the microphone for a while, with a series of questions about Jewish groups and illegal immigrants. Later, I asked one how he felt about the meeting and he said: “I thought we expressed ourselves openly. We all said our piece. We all listened. It wasn’t a debate just between the [main opposition] socialists and the UMP. All the parties expressed themselves, it’s true a bit forcefully at times. But’s that’s liberty. Just because we don’t agree with those in charge doesn’t make us extremists. That’s freedom of expression,” he exclaimed, and then repeated, “We’re not extremists.”

In the back of the room, a couple of voluble of young men with buzz cuts and dark suits barked when they didn’t like the minister’s answers. The crowd grew uneasy. Next, a bearded man with spiky hair took the microphone and read some prepared remarks.

We are pleased this evening to raise the level of the “great debate over national identity”. A debate that smells rancid in a country closed in on itself, a hollow debate that turns Arabs and Muslims into scapegoats instead of ensuring social justice, a debate that excludes instead of establishing a real equality of rights between each and every resident of this country. A debate that is nauseating…

At which point, the crowd emitted a spontaneous moan, and the man, part of a leftwing protest group called “the Pink Panthers,” pretended to vomit, spraying something from a can onto the floor. Here’s the video:

The group chanted for a while, then were escorted out. The local UMP politician and host of the evening, Bernard Debré, fustigated before the crowd, “What you have just seen here is an example of fascism!” After that outburst, things settled down. It was hard to escape the feeling that the evening has crossed over into farce. The attendees headed to the exit looked visibly relieved.

In the hallway, folks were less than enthused about how the debate turned out. A lady of a certain age with a blond bob, who told me she works in politics, called the debate “animated”, but didn’t think the minister said anything new. While outside, another lady brooding over an ultra-slim cigarette was scathing. “Yeah, it was interesting,” she granted, “but there are other problems that we should be occupying ourselves with besides the burqa and national identity. What gets me, is everyday there are people dying in the streets and nobody does anything about it.”

Women wearing the niqab in Turkey. Relatively rare in France, the French parliamentary debate to have it banned has drawn criticism from the left and from members of President Sakozy's ruling party. Mr. Sarkozy has sought to avoid an outright ban, which many feel would provoke a backlash and mostly likely conflict with the European Convention on Human Rights.

The young woman who earlier drew comparisons between this debate and the Mitterand era told me that she came to tonight’s meeting because she had attended one the previous week in Créteil, a suburb to the southeast of Paris that is home to many recent immigrants and people of north African origin. “I wanted to see how it would go in a rich neighborhood,” she said. “In Creteil. the room where they held the debate was pretty empty. Here, it was standing room only, and the majority were elderly.”

If it was the intention of the Sarkozy government to use these debates to grab the attention of their supporters and the media, then they’ve had a fair degree of success.  However, the polls suggest that the public isn’t wholly comfortable with the way the debate has been conducted. As the minister of Immigration and national identity, it is appropriate that Besson should moderate the discussion.  Except, he is far from a conciliatory figure. A socialist turncoat who defected from socialist presidential candidate Segolène Royale’s campaign in its closing weeks to join the Sarkozy camp, he has embraced his role as hatchet man for the administration’s tough stance on illegal immigration with the zeal of the converted. More recently, Mr. Sarkozy has had to backtrack on his confrontational stance over the niqab—the full body garment that the French persistently and incorrectly call the burqa—the whole hullabaloo has dominated the headlines nevertheless.

The irony, of course, is this “grand debate,” though nominally about the French, is really focused on French anxieties about those who are not French, or only recently French—the influx of immigrants and children of immigrants, illegal or otherwise, who are making French national culture increasingly difficult to define.

One could argue that simply holding a debate on national identity presupposes that there is a problem.  It is far from clear that national identity should be an easy thing to define—that would assume a narrow and backward-looking notion of identity. Happily, our 21st century self-conception is harder to pigeonhole, because it is more elusive and diffuse. Every one of us, individually, is a harmony of cultural, social, regional, ethnic, religious, gender, political and personal traits. And a noisy, trumped-up debate about national identity can’t drown our collective symphony.

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