Ethnicisation and urban stigmatisation in contemporary France: the case of "les jeunes de banlieue"

Résumé du document

In France, the concept of ethnicity, contrary to its Anglo-Saxon definition and use in anthropology for example, is philosophically, historically and politically connoted. Indeed, its use has its roots in the colonial history of France. Since the 1980s and the increasing social problems in the suburbs of France, sheltering a large population of immigrants, the concept has reappeared, within the ethnographs, sociologists and anthropologists inspired by the American anthropology. The discussion on the concept of ethnicity in France is highly ideological. It is politically and socially problematized. Ethnicity in the French republican thought is linked to the Anglo-Saxon idea of ?communitarism', ?multiculturalism' or ?cultural particularism'.

Extraits

[...] We will see however that also those one, living in the suburbs, have very often, the same identity issues. However, it seems that young black people identify themselves more to their counterparts in USA, and have no problem with their countries of origin. We refer here to schools in the suburbs, and to those which have an important number of young from immigrant origins. This means that pupils express their ‘ethnic' identity at school. The expression seems a bit redundant but it means schools where education is a top priority, because the students enroled there are mostly originated from disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and from immigrant origins. [...]

[...] Fights and confrontations between the police and groups of young persons grew in intensity. Arsons of public buildings and casts of stones on public properties, fire-fighters vehicles and buses have also been recorded by hundreds. Finally, the third phase of the riots saw their spreading to the rest of France, with the exception of Marseille[5], despite its strong immigrant population. Almost all the cities with ZUS Urbaine Sensible') were concerned by the unrest. What is worth noting here is one of the explanations to the spreading of the riots, namely the strong solidarity between the young of the suburbs, immigrants or not. [...]

[...] It is first a political idea incarnated in the figure of the citizen, but it is backed-up by the idea of Patrie which constitutes its cultural part. Nevertheless, since the mid 1980s the cohabitation of the three concepts of Nation, State and ‘Patrie' has been challenged by the discourses emanating from the second and third generations of migrants as well as by some regionalist movements and by the extreme right (Holm, 2002: 5). Usually Nation and ‘Patrie' are inclusive, whereas the state as an institution has nothing to do with the ‘Patrie' (Peloille, 1983: 106). [...]

[...] (1991), La France et ses étrangers, Paris : Calmann-Lévy I will use the term ‘cité' or ‘quartier' which is the notion used in France to talk about these parts of the French suburbs which have been primarily built and designed to welcome the immigrant workers from the former French colonies, especially from North Africa and to solve the housing crisis following the Second World War. The word refers now to these big ensembles of concrete towers. I will sometimes use this term instead of its English translation, in order to emphasize its particular meaning in French. Depaule J. C. [...]

[...] However ethnos referred more to the mentalities and the beliefs. The tribe was a political notion, and the ethnos was a cultural one. This historic overview on the theme of ethnicity permits a distanced look on what is today called “ethnicisation”. However, a lot of intellectuals and scholars criticize today the use of the concept in France. For them, like the geographer Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch as well as for Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, using ‘ethnicity' in the public debate to talk about the problems in the suburbs and more generally about the issue regarding the integration of immigrants of second and third generation, especially the young, contributes to legitimize the development of the social fragmentation of the French society, and also contributes to disqualify some groups because of their origin. [...]