Essay: The myth of French blackness
The relentless assimilationist model of French society has caused endless friction with immigrants, who, whether black or Arab, remain the Other
Sometimes in the 1950’s, the French philosopher Roland Barthes, waiting in a barbershop in Paris, picked up a copy of the magazine Paris-Match. On the cover was a young black man in a French uniform, his eyes uplifted, frozen in a salute at what seemed to be the Tricolour, the national flag. The philosopher saw what the image was trying to say: “that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.”
That is how, Barthes goes on to say in his book Mythologies, how myths work. His take on myth is very different from what we might readily assume in India – the stories, legends, and wisdoms handed down from past generations through oral and scriptural memory. For the French philosopher, myth causes history to evaporate and naturalize certain symbols. There might be some of that in Brahminical Hindu myths too, as caste-oppressed intellectuals such as Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd have pointed out, but that’s a different discussion. Barthes’ focus is very much on the myths created by modernity. There is much history behind the reality of the black soldier in the French uniform, and that is precisely the history of colonialism and slavery. But the image causes all that history to vanish, and seeks to naturalize the black soldier saluting the French flag, creating the myth of race-blind French equality, and the power of multicultural patriotism in France. That patriotic black soldier is the dream of the white imperialist – the recurring Uncle Tom and his black benevolence, the kind and pacific Reverend Stephen Kumalo in the South African writer Alan Paton’s apartheid-era bestseller Cry, the Beloved Country. Even that moment in Gone with the Wind when Scarlet O’Hara looks at the black slaves from her plantation, laughing and bantering on their way to fight a war for the side that seeks to keep them enslaved – and mistakes their momentary laughter as genuine happiness, deploring Abraham Lincoln for initiating the Civil War.
As Barthes senses, these myths are unmistakably modern. There was something openly brutal and savage about early European colonialisms, such as those driven by Spain and Portugal, mostly in the Americas but also elsewhere. Genocide and torture were part of their quotidian paraphernalia. The European Enlightenment of the late-18th century changed everything, with its narrative of progress, modernity, and universal reason. Savage brutality needed to be replaced by legitimizing narratives about colonial domination. Enter the White Man’s Burden and the argument for spreading “civilization” to the “darkest” stretches of the globe. The two major post-Enlightenment colonizers, the British and the French, were markedly different from their Spanish and Portuguese predecessors, not only in their superior weaponry of science, technology, and full-blown capitalism, but also in their softer power of the claim to spread modernity and progress. Nowhere did the difference become more blatant than in South Africa, where the earlier Dutch settlers, most of whom left a pre-Enlightenment Europe, were quickly put in a place of inferiority and subordination as the English arrived in the Cape and Natal in the 19th century. Next to the modern, industrial English, the earlier Dutch and Huguenots were a primitive, farming population, uncouth – hence the birth of the word “boor” from Boer.
Both the British and the French tried to make the fullest use of the two prime means of soft power they had: The Church and education – the first to convert the heathens to the Christian flock, and the second to convince the colonized the superiority of Western culture, though they met with staggered success in different colonies, such as between Africa and South Asia. Even so, it is well-known now that the study of English literature got its first life in India, in the early 19th century, when only the classics were prestigious enough to be admitted as university subjects in Oxbridge. Decolonization has been the hardest on the soft fronts, clearly always ongoing, and who knows, given the irreversible nature of colonial modernity, never fully desirable either, particularly when the only other option seems to be home-grown chauvinism.
There were key differences between the French and British style colonialisms. The British localized their administration according to the character of different places; neither did they quite try to Anglicize whole native populations – just creating a buffer class of babus and brown sahibs were enough for their ideological and administrative purposes. The French model, on the other hand, was that of assimilation and centralization. Dakar was the centre of French administration in Africa, and the goal was to Gallicize the natives as much as possible. That is the political nerve touched by Roland Barthes in his reading of the image of the Paris-Match: That the black solider is exactly like any other French citizen, in his patriotism and his loyalty to the Tricolour. While there carries a goal of egalitarianism, it suppresses that violence that must power such equalization, the complete erasure of indigenous character, the denial of the exploitation French colonialism has carried out on black people in Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere around the world.
Anti-colonial thinkers from the Francophonie have repeated pointed to the softer power and the self-concealing myths that have ensured the ideological success of colonialism. None has described the sexual anxieties of the black man more viscerally than the Martinique psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon. The négritude movement, led by French writers from the colonies, notably Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léopold Senghor, who was to become the president of Senegal, particularly rebelled against the assimilation policy of French colonial rule. But this is exactly where the civilising claims of French colonialism have prevented a large section of the French public from seeing the ravages of its overseas rule that, beyond its direct consequences on the colonies, have led to waves of migration, long past decolonisation, to what was once the mother ship. We are here because you were there. That’s the simplistic rationale behind a trajectory that is shaped by a myriad of material and ideological reasons, ranging from postcolonial poverty and trauma to the pursuit of metropolitan modernity and the promise of a good life.
But the immigrant, black or Arab, remains the Other, usually exotic and often dangerous. The relentlessly assimilationist model of French society has caused endless friction with immigrants, that between secularism and religious attire in institutions being one of the most obvious and persistent. But the most tragic and traumatic violence, that of police brutality on immigrants of colour, remains a spectre that continues to haunt France. The suppressed history of some of the most flaunted myths of French society - such as that of the patriotic and dedicated black solider before the French flag bared by Barthes – is rooted in its history, culture, literature, art, and philosophy. Till the French public, or at least it’s politicians, accept the hidden colonial histories of these myths, the violence will get no respite.
Saikat Majumdar’s forthcoming work includes the novella The Remains of the Body and the nonfiction book, The Amateur.
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