The Pat Buchanan of France?

Gérard Longuet, majority leader in the French Senate, let one slip yesterday when he rejected the nomination of a French official of North African descent to head the High Authority Against Discrimination and For Equality, saying he was not "of traditional French descent." As offensive as the comments of our own majority leader regarding the president's skin tone were, these comments are of a different order of magnitude and cut straight to the core of the debate over national identity that has gripped the country.

The full quote was this: "It is better that the head be of traditional French descent, someone who will feel a greater burden to welcome all of our compatriots. Examples would be natives of Brittany and Lorraine -- who are mostly of Italian or Moroccan descent -- who struggle to open themselves up to outsiders. If you make only a symbolic nomination, someone actually from the outside, you risk endangering the mission."   

Somewhere in there, you can make out the point he is trying to make: that since it is "traditional" French who struggle most with integration, naming someone from a "traditional" background would do most to evoke their sympathies. The irony, of course, is that by excluding the nominee, Malek Boutih -- a former head of SOS Racisme and a functionary in the Socialist Party who was born in France -- from the "corps francais traditionnel" (the term he actually used), he is preempting the very mission he is ostensibly attempting to defend.

Reaction has been strong and swift, with one anti-discrimination association declaring "the return of psychologically repressed racism," while others have accused him of attempting to advance the UMP's efforts to to siphon off votes from the Front national. 

Ultimately this will amount to a mini-crisis, with no serious long-term implications--indeed, none of the coverage of the incident was among LeMonde's top 10 most viewed stories this morning. But each new incident like this further widens the trust gap between France's minority and majority populations.

France's Struggles with Diversity

Interview (FR) with the head of the Representative Council of Black Organizations, who discusses the need for a law to actively promote diversity in French society. At the end of the report, the interviewee, Patrick Lozès, talks about how much progress America has made in the last 40 years -- developments that we would directly attribute to Title VI (prohibiting Federal discrimination in government employment and services) and Title VII (prohibiting discrimination in the hiring of workers) of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; France would certainly benefit from having its own versions of these.  Of course, that act was preceded by large-scale marches and protests; a similar movement has yet to emerge in France. Difficult to say why this is so. Perhaps it is because the discrimination that Blacks in France face is more subtle and less uniform than something like a "whites-only" drinking fountain. More broadly, we seem to be living in an age of leader-less mass movements (no one was really at the head of the Iran protests). So in a situation that would seem to call for a King-like figure, it is not that surprising that none has emerged.