The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass

Jacques Rancière

Writing in Libération, Jacques Rancière talks about populism and French politics today. Verso

The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass

Not a day goes by without the risks of populism being denounced on all sides. But it is not so easy to grasp what the word denotes. What is a populist? Despite various fluctuations of meaning, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it in terms of three essential features: a style of speech addressed directly to the people, bypassing representatives and dignitaries; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more concerned with feathering their own nest than with the public interest; a rhetoric of identity that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners.

Provincializing France?

Achille Mbembe - Provincializing France by christyh3

The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud & the Paris Commune

by Kristin Ross
Foreword by Terry Eagleton
 

A thrilling ride through the literature of Rimbaud in a France in the throes of revolution.

The 1870s in France – Rimbaud’s moment, and the subject of this book – is a decade virtually ignored in most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France’s expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence on the Paris Commune – the construction of the revolutionary urban space.

Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristin Ross has written a book that is at once a history and geography of the Commune’s anarchist culture – its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances.

Fifty years after Algeria's independence, France is still in denial

An exhibition in Paris marking the years of colonial rule in Algeria whitewashes the crimes of France's erstwhile empire 

by Nabila Ramdani, The Guardian 

In 1962, Bob Dylan released his first album, Brigitte Bardot was at the height of her fame, and the James Bond film Dr No was made. It was the start of a decade which would forever be associated with creativity and entertainment.

The Racism of the Intellectuals,

by Alain Badiou, Le Monde (translated by Democracy & Class Struggle)

The extent of the vote for Marianne Le Pen is surprising and overwhelming; we look for explanations–The political class comes out with a handy sociology: the France of the lower classes, the misled provincials, the workers, the under-educated, frightened by globalization, the decline in purchasing power, the disintegration of their districts, and foreign strangers present at their doors, wants to retreat into nationalism and xenophobia.

May 1968, France: The LibCom Reading Guide

Libcom

Key texts

• Paris: May 1968 - Maurice Brinton's diary - A vivid and exciting eyewitness report by a member of Solidarity on the events in Paris in May 1968.
• Worker-Student Action Committees, France May '68 - Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman - In-depth look at the worker-student action committees formed during France May '68
• May-June 1968: A Situation Lacking in Workers' Autonomy - Mouvement Communiste - Detailed history and critical analysis of the May-June 1968 movement in France.
• Obsolete Communism: A Left-Wing Alternative - Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit - Excellent book on France 1968 by two participants, giving an account of the revolt as well as how it was co-opted with the help of the unions and French Communist Party.

Henri Lefebvre’s Youthfulness of Heart

by Andy Merrifield, The Brooklyn Rail, 2004

I never met Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist philosopher, nor saw him lecture. Some of my friends who did said he was a real knockout. Others who had contact with him recall his warm, slow, melodious voice, his boyish passions, his virility—even in old age—and the posse of young, attractive women invariably in his train. Portraits cast him as a Rabelaisian monk and Kierkegaardian seducer all rolled into one. I’m sorry I missed this act, missed the man himself, en direct, live. But I did see him on British TV once, back in the early 1990s. The series, “The Spirit of Freedom,” was strictly for insomniacs and appeared in the wee hours. Each of the four programs tried to assess the legacy of Left French intellectuals during the twentieth-century. The cynical tone throughout wasn’t too surprising given that its narrator and brainchild was Bernard-Henri Lévy—BHL, as the French media know him—Paris-Match’s answer to Jean-Paul Sartre.

Colonialism and Neocolonialism

Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It includes Sartre's celebrated preface to Fanon's classic Wretched of the Earth. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism had a profound impact on French intellectual life, inspiring many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

Daily Humiliation

'Daily Humiliation' is from Alain Badiou's Polemics, first published in Le Monde following the riots in Parisian banlieues and throughout France in November 2005 - from Verso.

'Constant identity checks and questioning by police.' Of all the complaints made by the youth of this country in revolt, the omnipresence of police checks and being arrested in their everyday lives, this harassment without respite, is the most constant, the most widely shared. Do we really realize what this grievance means? The dose of humiliation and violence it implies?

The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France And England, 1730-1848

'He put the mind back into history and restored the dignity of man.' --A J P Taylor

'It may seem incredible that nobody tried before to discover what sort of people actually stormed the Bastille, but Rude was the first to have done so....Like all his work, this book is concentrated, simple and clear, and admirably suited to the non-specialist reader.' --Eric Hobsbawm, New York Review of Books 

George Rudé was a prolific researcher and writer. Although he began his academic career at the age of fifty, he wrote some 15 books and edited several others. He was one of the leading practitioners of ‘history from below’ and his work influenced an entire generation of historians of the French Revolution. 

Simone de Beauvoir

Racism: A Passion from Above

by Jacques Rancière, Monthly Review

I'd like to add some reflections on the notion of "state racism" to our meeting's agenda.  These reflections run against a widespread interpretation of measures that our government has recently taken, from the law on the veil to the expulsions of the Roma.  This interpretation detects an opportunism that is exploiting racism and xenophobia for electoral gain.  This supposed critique reinforces the assumption that racism is a popular passion, the frightened and irrational reaction of retrograde layers of the population, who can't adapt to the new mobile and cosmopolitan world.  The state is accused of failing in its duty by showing indifference towards these populations.  But this accusation only reinforces the state's position representing itself as the face of rationality vis-à-vis popular irrationality.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Decolonization in the Heart of Empire: Some Fanonian Echoes in France Today

 by Stefan Kipfer, Antipode, 2011 (Click here to download this paper in pdf.)

This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post-colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re-articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post-colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of “autonomy” and “mixity”. “Autonomy” (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio-politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter-colonial than post-colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique “live” in France today.

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

by Kristin Ross, 1996

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts - automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism - as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses.

Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics

By Emilio Quadrelli, Mute Magazine, 2007

French cities burst back into flames after President Sarkozy’s election on a ‘clean the scum off the streets with a high-pressure hose’ ticket. It won't be the last time, as long as the factors necessitating the mass revolt of November 2005 remain in place, in France and elsewhere. This text, based on Emilio Quadrelli's interviews in the Paris banlieues during and after the 2005 events, overthrows the whole spectrum of slurs against the racialised, pathologised racaille. The myth of an all-boy riot is trashed by female combatant leaders, and leftist commonplaces incur special scorn, above all those about the inarticulate cry for help of the ‘socially excluded’

Fanon and space: colonization, urbanization, and liberation from the colonial to the global city

by Stefan Kipfer, Environment and Planning: Society and Space,  2007, volume 25, pages 701 - 726.

Stimulated by recent controversies about the headscarf in France, this paper offers a fresh look at the spatial and urban dimensions of the work of Frantz Fanon. While there is widespread agreement that the work of Fanon (which preceded the so-called `spatial turn' in social theory) includes powerful spatial dimensions, there is no consensus about the status of `space' in Fanon's texts. Postcolonial theorists, whose reading of Fanon dominated the Anglo-American academic world until recently, have applauded the prevalence of spatial metaphors in Fanon's work as a sign for the latter's discomfort with dialectical thought and matters of historical transformation and thus as a sign for `third-space' thinking. Representing a new, heterodox wave of Fanon interpretation and insisting on Fanon's Hegelian-Marxist, radical Black, and phenomenological preoccupations with liberation, other readers have detected a shift from spatial to temporal concerns in Fanon's work. While building on this latter reading of Fanon, I argue that the spatial aspects in Fanon's work are neither a function of a philosophical imperative of nonrepresentability nor in contradiction with his concerns about temporal transformation.

The Left and Racial Domination in France: An Interview with Sadri Khiari (PIR)

by Daniele Obono, The Decolonial Translation Group 

Sadri Khiari, a Tunisian activist exiled in France since early 2003, is one of the founding members of the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic (PIR) of which he is currently one of its principal leaders. He has published, among others, Pour une politique de la racaille. Immigré-e-s, indigènes et jeunes de banlieue (Éditions Textuel, Paris, 2006) and La contre-révolution coloniale en France: de de Gaulle à Sarkozy (Éditions La Fabrique, Paris, 2009).1 The MIR (which in January 2010 became the PIR, as it transformed into a party) was born following a call in January of 2005, titled "We Are the Indigenous of the Republic,"2 signed by thousands of people and associations. Since then, the MIR has sought to unite and organize descendants of colonial migrants in popular suburbs3 in France as militants in its ranks, with the prospect of constructing an instrument of autonomous political struggle on the basis of a problematic articulated by questions of racism, colonialism, and imperialism.The spokesperson of the PIR is Houria Bouteldja.

White women and the privilege of solidarity

by Houria Bouteldja, The Decolonial Translation Group

Houria Bouteldja gave this speech at the 4th International Congress of Islamic Feminism that took place in Madrid, in October 2010.

I would, first of all, like to thank the Junta Islamica Catalana for having organized this colloquium, which is a real breath of fresh air in a Europe that is shrivelling up in upon itself, wrought up in xenophobic debates and increasingly rejecting difference/alterity.

May '68 and Its Afterlives

May '68 & its Afterlives

by Kristin Ross, 2002

During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications.