How French politics has ended up being a politics of culture.
Excerpts from Daniel Zamora’s article on Catalyst
The shift is due to the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity.
Politicians, media commentators, and scholars from both left and right all seem to agree that the French political debate has been contaminated… What they’ve been labeling ‘Americanization’ is a certain kind of identity politics they believe is threatening French republicanism.
Despite Macron’s professed disdain for identity politics, his alternative can scarcely be construed as anti-identitarian.
To understand this state of affairs, we need to look at the recent history of identity in France, a history that begins not with woke concepts colonizing French universities but rather with the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism.
In twenty-first-century France, the right-wing historian Patrick Buisson observed, identity trumps class, and conflicts over the economy give way to disagreements over the definition of the national lifestyle and how to preserve it.
If there is anything like an Americanization of France, its most significant manifestation would be the displacement of class struggle onto the terrain of culture wars. Over the last forty years, left and right governments alike have advanced a neoliberal agenda and promoted cultural controversies as a substitute for meaningful debate over the economy. It is this post-ideological turn that has increasingly reshaped French politics along identitarian lines.
With the turn of the socialist government toward economic orthodoxy in 1983, the revolutionary tradition within French politics was finally vanquished… this long decline of the aspiration for the revolutionary takeover of the state wasn’t the effect of American books smuggled into French universities, but rather a conscious political project led from the top down by elites.
From 1983. François Mitterand himself embraced austerity. Nationalizations were replaced by privatizations, and labor market reforms and wage moderation were implemented to enhance France’s industrial competitiveness in a globalized market… As Jacques Delors put it at that time, ‘All the French must convert, as a matter of urgency, to the spirit of the market.’
That same year François Hollande urged: ‘The dogmatic conception of the working class, the idea that the workplace could also be a space of freedom, the notion that individuals belong to solid social groups, the affirmation of a timeless political programme … all this must be abandoned.’
French ‘socialists’ became key players in building a neoliberal European Union, first with the liberalization of capital movements in 1988, and then with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which was massively rejected among blue-collar workers.
If the specter of the revolution had vanished, culture and identity would become the central question for French politics… As Hollande wrote, the Left had not been ‘an economic project anymore’ but ‘a system of values,’ not ‘a way of producing but a way of being.’
Class itself was to become just another identity, rather than a structure around which capitalism organizes itself. The point wasn’t to transform the economic system anymore, but to allow everyone to compete in it.
While endorsing a neoliberal economic agenda, French ‘socialists’ expanded their action on the cultural front and promoted a modernized anti-racist discourse, slowly abandoning a straightforward defense of class struggle.
The ‘socialist NGO’ ended up advocating an apolitical conception of anti-racism made of public concerts, television shows, and support from celebrities and wealthy liberals. Used as a political tool by the socialist government, SOS Racisme promoted a narrow understanding of racism disconnected from the broader struggle against inequality.
As the sociologist Abdelalli Hajjat noted, while the young Arabs of the march became examples to promote tolerance and made their symbolic entry into public space, unionized workers were depicted as Muslim agitators.
In a way, religion was emphasized over class struggle in the workplace, while in the suburbs, culture eclipsed social problems like housing and employment. Such a strategy by French socialists made it more difficult for young Arabs to think about their conditions through the lens of class relations. This transformation, fueled by socialists’ complete retreat on the economic front and the decline of working-class militancy, would, in the following decade, accelerate the disconnect between the Left and the working class.
Working-class voters would increasingly abstain from voting, while the Left relied more and more on educated voters.
Redefined as an identity, class now appeared as an outmoded and conservative social formation.
Hollande’s presidency vastly expanded tax cuts for corporations, labor market deregulation, and deindustrialization, while on the cultural front it won substantial victories on gay marriage, surrogacy rights, and the recognition of France’s colonial past… A renewed appeal to republicanism itself would become the object of contested definitions of citizenship.
Mainstream political figures and newspapers like Le Figaro would openly associate Muslims with a great threat to the survival of “French culture.
Mass parties were soon replaced by American-style televised primaries, with competing political entrepreneurs trying to win shares of a market. Like any other Western democracy, France was now characterized by free-falling electoral participation, corrupted political campaigns flooded with cash, and privately owned media channels that increasingly looked like Fox News.
Under Buisson’s advice, Nicolas Sarkozy centered his campaign and presidency on the restoration of French identity, lost in the storm of globalization and Muslim immigration… Taking most of the classic ideas of the extreme right of the 1980s mainstream, he argued that if capital could now easily travel beyond borders, ‘cultural borders’ needed to be preserved at all costs.
The point was to transform the social insecurity generated by neoliberal reforms and deindustrialization into a fear of losing one’s culture due to Muslim immigration. Connecting immigration with national identity, the French president openly framed the discussion on citizenship along racial and religious lines.
Macron’s current iteration of such a strategy is no different: not an alternative to identity politics but a way of avoiding the social question. In order to address the class conflicts generated by his own policies, especially the two-year struggle of the gilets jaunes movement, the president consciously decided to focus the political conversation on what it means to be French.
As noted by Mitchell Dean, in Macron’s France, ‘every tear-gas projectile and rubber bullet, and every injury caused by them, to the eyes, hands, faces and bodies of the protesters’ attested not to a crisis of identity but ‘to the failure of the imposition of a neoliberal governmentality’…The historian Gérard Noiriel pointed out that one of the great achievements of the movement was precisely its success in momentarily marginalizing identity quarrels, putting the social question at the center of the public sphere.
Macron combined elements of the neoliberal model with the illiberal, identitarian one.
While France is living one of the worst economic crises in recent history, ‘the French news cycle isn’t led by discussion over truly universal issues like wealth inequality, the health system or climate change. Instead it’s focused on navel-gazing debates about identity, fueled by television personalities.’
If Macron achieved anything during his chaotic presidency, it was certainly not, as Jürgen Habermas had enthusiastically hoped, transforming the European ‘elite project into a citizens’ project,’ but rather the emboldening and normalization of France’s extreme right.
Focusing too much on another version of identity, a more fluid one à la Mélenchon, perhaps, would only provide the Right with the kind of Left it wants… The real Americanization, openly promoted by the French political class over the last forty years, is the long but steady transformation, as Walter Benn Michaels pointed out, of replacing ‘the differences between what people think (ideology) and the differences between what people own (class) with the differences between what people are (identity).’ In such a framework, conflicts over the distribution of wealth have been conveniently replaced by conflicts over who we are. Replaced, in other words, by another kind of class politics — the class politics of the ruling elites.
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