Tag: history

There are times when a writer must shift dialectical gears by focusing on developments in a totally different society in other to grasp and appreciate what is going on in his own society.  An allegory could be a compressed story—or in this case an event— which illuminates and deepens our understanding of another story or event. In its constant disputation with humanity, there are times when history wears as an allegorical garb as it beams its light on totally unrelated events.

When it was written twelve years ago after violent racial riots broke out in Paris, the essay that follows this short introduction could not have foreseen or anticipated that what was unfolding was a mere precursor to murderous mayhem which would years later shake modern France to its very  foundation and prepare the ground for the emergence of Monsieur Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace.

It was not the Germans that eventually set Paris ablaze. It was internal contradictions, particularly an ill-digested unitarism parading as egalitarianism. But crisis often brings out the best in organic nations. With the great French Left ossifying into historic irrelevance, with the centre imploding and with rightwing extremism on the rampage, the best of France came together to elect their youngest president ever.

At the level of banal textual explication, it is always a sobering and humbling affair to peruse what you have written ages ago. You marvel at the prophetic acuity of what you got right and the appalling presumptuousness of what you didn’t. Above all, you are compelled to marvel at the fate of historically deaf societies.

Is Paris Burning?

Adolf Hitler once came upon what he thought was the final solution to the French question: Conquer France and burn down Paris. The spat between the redoubtable Germans and their equally formidable foes across the Rhine was as historic as it was memorable.

In the run up to the treaty of Versailles which was to lead directly to the emergence of Hitler and the disaster that was the Second World War, the American negotiators were baffled by the intense hostility of the French to the Germans. One of them, appalled and alarmed by the unreasonable and impossible demands for reparations the French were piling on their fallen tormentors, walked up to the French prime-minister, Georges  Clemenceau, a.k.a the tiger. “But sir have you ever been to Germany?” he was asked.

“Never! But twice in my lifetime, Germans have been to Paris”, came the terse reply. Clemenceau was of course referring to the national humiliation of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war and the beginning of the First World War when German tanks and armory rolled relentlessly to the gates of Paris.

Had the old man loitered around long enough, he would have witnessed an even more humiliating fiasco in the Second World War when Hitler’s panzer divisions rounded the Maginot line and tore their way into Paris with time, men and material to spare. The French military High Command was left wondering what hit them.

The cocktail of mutual contempt and condescension had reached its ultimate potency. For the Germans, beautiful Paris in all its gothic grandeur and baroque splendour was the ultimate symbol of the cultural arrogance and merciless superciliousness of the French. Let it be obliterated from human memory.  And let the proud frog-eaters eat the humble pie for thinking that the Germans were barbarians from Bavarian peat bog. You cannot claim to be arbiters of taste and culture without commensurate firepower. As far as historic grudges go this was probably the ultimate.

Hitler eventually conquered France and Paris, but the plot to incinerate Paris soon got lost in a maze of strategic priorities. In any case, since the deranged Austrian corporal thought he was going to be there forever, there was no point in hurrying. Paris was thus spared by sheer providence. But the plot to torch it spawned a conspiracy industry and a whole series of counter-factual treatises. The most magnificent and chilling of these is the book titled: Is Paris Burning?

In early November, the great city finally obliged. But this time, it was not a new Hitler or the Germans settling historical scores. It was a self-inflicted catastrophe. The enemy was within. For almost fortnight a, most of France and Paris in particular was lapped by tongues of fiery flames.

It was no longer a question of whether Paris was ablaze but whether it would burn to ground. The inferno fanned inwards, from the huge ghettoes that ringed the city, ——the periphérique as they are called—  and hell-holes of a marginalized and deprived underclass made up mainly of immigrant communities from Africa and denizens from the new French racial underground. As they made bonfires of national vanities, the lie of racial integration that Republican France had lived exploded in her face. It was not a pretty picture.

But France was not alone in facing this moment of truth. All is restive on the western front. Everywhere, western civilization, as we know it, is in crisis. Historians will probably pinpoint the outgoing year as the precise point of departure when new realities finally vanquished old myths.

From the United States and most of Western Europe, the images of 2005 are not very reassuring. If Hurricane Katrina exposed the soft underbelly of racial inequities and the hollow myth of the American dream, particularly with regards to those who were forcibly incorporated into the project, the metropolitan mayhem in England in July showcased an acute post-colonial crisis for the colonizing metropolis: how to handle the claims of  former colonial subjects and their descendants in the post-empire society.

The claims are pressing, and they have led to scenes of utmost horror in even the most refined and civilized of western societies. In 2004, Holland nearly tipped over into the pit of racial conflagration when Theo Van Goth, the irreverent and iconoclastic film-maker, became a victim of a horrific racially and religiously motivated ritual murder. He was repeatedly stabbed and then shot. A knife was then firmly planted in his chest with a note.

Pleasant and diffident Amsterdam woke up to find that its multiracial innocence and cultural tolerance was under siege. In Germany where the immigrant Turkish minority are contemptuously referred to as “gastarbeiter” and are not considered worthy of citizenship even after thirty years of residence, a tense face-off may yet explode in violence. In Belgium with its sizeable immigrant community from central Africa, a copycat version of the Paris firefight blossomed briefly before it was stamped out.

Like some monster arboreal species, the tree of western domination is beginning to bear interesting fruits; some pleasant to the palate and some utterly repelling.  Who would have thought that children of immigrant parents soundly educated and brought up within the British value system would one day take up arms against the same society?

Who would have thought that those whose parents were grateful to be plucked from the clutches of poverty and pandemic in the Third World would one day rise in fiery indignation and in total defiance of the hosting state and the timidity of their placid ancestors?

But for the post-Katrina calamity and its horrid images, who would have thought that there still exist in the United States ghettoes and slums that would make the hell-holes and urban zoos of sub-Saharan Africa look like paradise on earth?

As the great French philosopher would observe, the times are truly out of joints. Yet it is the French model of racial integration that must be of utmost interest to the modern world as it finally unravels at the seams. This is because it is the most ambitious, the most noble, the most visionary, the most republican and perhaps the most radical attempt to create human society anew from the ashes of feudalism.

Despite their revolutionary rhetoric, the founders of America were not starry-eyed idealists. They never believed that humankind was created in equality. Some of them were avid slave-holders.

The abolition of formal slavery notwithstanding, human and civil rights had to be fought for every inch of the way, thanks to the heroes of the civil rights movements and ordinary people faced with extraordinary circumstances like the recently deceased Rosa Parks. Britain took the easy way out: a great fudge and a typically British compromise. Let it be a multi-racial and multi-cultural society once the core values of the nation are respected.

But in their hubristic high-mindedness the founding fathers of modern France had no such inhibition. The great war-cry of the French revolution was liberty, egalitarianism and fraternity. Every inhabitant of French soil must become French. No French citizen must be discriminated against on the basis of racial origin or mode of worship.

In most official forms in France, there is no reference to racial origin or mode of worship. The state is the father of all, the imagined patriarch of an imagined national community, the great umbrella offering shelter to all in a Gaullist meltdown. It is of course an impassioned humbug, a monarchical unitarism gone haywire.

But it worked for its time. And so a Leopold Senghor from Senegal and a Houphouet-Boigny  from Ivory Coast found themselves as honorary Frenchmen delivering impassioned speeches at the French assembly as elected deputies. And Jean Bokassa, the deranged despot from Ubangi-Shari, found himself weeping more than the bereaved at the burial of Charles de Gaulle.

What then happened, and why is Paris burning? The great French model is a classic example of how a revolutionary ideal can atrophy and ossify into a deadening dogma. The law may be the law, but human beings will always be human beings. The great French revolutionaries never reckoned with France becoming a huge unwieldy empire in its own right, a gargantuan machine of colonial terror and oppression.

As the empire expanded and the logic of human domination unfolded, great waves of immigrants from the colonized domains also began to seek shelter and solace in the colonizing dominion. The homogenizing mill, filled to capacity, began to feel the strain of ungainly grist and the laboratory began to belch smoke.

Unlike their fathers who were eternally grateful to be granted a toe-hold in a saner clime, it is the immigrant children and grandchildren who began to see through the smokescreen of post-colonial abracadabra. Some of them who were lucky to escape the slums have performed at the highest level of sporting endeavours for their new country. Many have died in wars for the fatherland. Yet something did not add up.

You send a set of speculative applications for employment to officialdom, one with an aristocratic sounding French surname, the other with a Muslim name or some lip-cruncher from Equatorial Africa and it is the one with the perfect French patronymic that gets interview appointments while the colonial abomination ends up in the dustbin. Try this for housing, and you get the same result. The law may be clear, but you cannot blame the poor official. In a situation of great scarcity, people tend to take care of their own first.

This, then, is the great social contradiction that has brought  France’s immigrant youths to arson and mayhem. The conclusion remains inescapable that despite the French Revolution and the radical rhetoric, France remains very much a stratified and hierarchical society. Yet as the economy shrank due to dwindling largesse of from the former empire, an uncompetitive workforce and the consequent loss of entrepreneurial initiative, it should be obvious that you can only redistribute wealth you have created in the first instance. And you can only provide employment when you have created job opportunities.

France is faced with tough decisions compounded by the burdens of political memory. It can go the way of untrammeled capitalism: roll back the great Gaullist state, give free reign to human greed and enterprise and welcome the savage competitiveness which is the secret of the American economic miracle. The result may be new found prosperity but also the disappearance of a whole way of life, particularly the sedate ambience and cultured lassitude that have defined France for generations, in short the Americanization of France which its elite hate with a passion.

On the other hand, France may hand over the state to monsieur Le Pen and the rabid right. In which case, the rampaging immigrant youths would be told that France was meant for the real French and they can either take it or lump it. The ensuing repressive ferocity would then turn the land of liberty, fraternity and egalité into an anarchic slave-holding camp.

It may then be time for a new French revolution.  Toussaint L’Overture , the great revolutionary of African descent, who had urged the triumphant French revolutionists not to substitute a race-based aristocracy for the class-based aristocracy they had dismantled would be turning in his grave in righteous fulfillment.

France should not be ashamed. In the drive to nudge humanity to a higher telos, republican rhetoric has always outpaced harsh reality. Ask the timeless China of Confucius. Ask the ancient Roman Empire with its slave-holding economy. Ask the old Athenian democracy.  It is then left to human will to bridge the gap between ideal and actuality.

But if societies that have thrown up such political visionaries and outstandingly humane thinkers come up for short in the ideal human communion, one must shudder at the fate of people who have denied themselves the capacity to produce either.

• First published in 2005.