Such a remarkable defeat

The French voters roundly defeated Jean-Marie Le Pen rather than enthusiastically voted Jacques Chirac to the presidency. His fierce opposit...

The French voters roundly defeated Jean-Marie Le Pen rather than enthusiastically voted Jacques Chirac to the presidency. His fierce opposition to the European Union and his explicit racism made Le Pen and his neo-fascist party, National Front, anathema to the majority in France.

Had it not been for Le Pen8217;s emergence in the first round as a presidential candidate, the election would have been a tame contest between Gaullist Jacques Chirac and Socialist Lionel Jospin. There is hardly any difference in the political platforms of the two, and it is this absence of difference perhaps that accounted for a record 30 per cent abstention in the first round. The electorate, many say, was bored by the lack of options on offer.

Le Pen8217;s vilification of the immigrants from North Africa as the bane of France, his vulgar chauvinism, and his opposition to the European Union appeal beyond his traditional electoral base of petty traders, a section of the workers and peasants and small businessmen. It was much the same social base that Joe McCarthy8217;s reactionary nationalism had in the America of the fifties or Bal Thackeray8217;s Shiv Sena boasts of today.

This time Le Pen reached out to a wider section of the French society by focusing on September 11. He exploited the event to whip up anti-immigrant feelings among the French. Three million Arab immigrants were portrayed by him as potential terrorists.

After 9/11, popular resentment against Muslim immigrants and citizens and the Islamic world in general has greatly increased in France and in other European countries, even in relatively small and tolerant Denmark.

Post 9/11, France was indeed receptive to Le Pen8217;s racist ideology. And he is particularly hostile to the Algerians, for they forced France to give up its prized colonial possession. I heard him once whistle an old colonial jingle in the 1995 presidential election, 8216;L8216;Algerie Francaise8217; Algeria is French. Remember France fought the cruelest of the colonial wars fought by any European power in Algeria, killing three million people between 1954-62.

Le Pen8217;s reactionary ideology springs not from religion but a peculiar brand of French republicanism. At the heart of it is an idea that says all persons living in France are French citizens and this alone is the basis of French nationhood. Citizenship is entirely grounded in the principle of the natural rights of man. Of all the old democracies, the French democracy holds an entirely secular concept of citizenship. A French citizen, regardless of his race or religion, is simply the bearer of rights the 1789 revolution proclaimed.

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Le Pen denies an Arab citizenship not explicitly on racist or religious grounds, but on the grounds that an Arab cannot be a true bearer of the rights that come with citizenship. According to this ideology, the right to liberty that the French state confers on an individual is something only a white Frenchman can understand and enjoy.

Immigration from the north and sub-Saharan Africa has become a problem for France because France largely remains a mono-lingual and mono-cultural country. It is not sensitive to the cultures, languages and religions of the immigrants as Britain and the US are.

The infamous chador case in France some six years ago reveals the insensitivity of the French to the cultures of the immigrants. In keeping with her custom an Arab girl wore a chador, a veil, over her head while going to a lycee a state run school. She was asked to remove it because the law rules there cannot be a statement of religion in a public place.

But Britain, more sensitive than France to the culture and religion of the immigrants, permitted Sikh bus drivers to keep their turbans despite objections by some members of the London Transport Workers. That was over thirty years ago. Today Britain is sincerely attempting to become multicultural. Unless France gives up 8216;one-language one-culture8217; as the basis of nationhood, it cannot begin to assimilate the Arab and other non-white immigrants. Their language and culture are their emotional anchor in a society they feel is hostile to them. The French must acknowledge that diversity, not uniformity, is the basis of a nation.