Rednecks and Barbarians of France

I strongly dislike Paris. I am tall, and everything there is too small. Parisians seem to treat grime and grumpiness as necessary for life. The freedom (and new forms of unfreedom) that James Baldwin found in Paris, where it was North Africans, not Blacks, who occupied the lowest rung on the social hierarchy, is a thing of the past. Like Manhattan, the core arrondissements have been fully captured by the elite: by French with generational wealth, cosmopolitan Francophiles, and, of course, the many tourists.

But I enjoy being reminded of my dislikes, and I recently spent a few days lecturing at the École Normale Supérieure and Sciences Po, France’s Princeton and Yale. For generations, the most distinguished French writers, politicians, and scientists – as well as the loyal opposition to the French elite – have been trained at these institutions, from Louis Pasteur to Nicolas Sarkozy, Marcel Proust to Jean-Paul Sartre. Even more than in the United States, class in France is rigid, held in place by educational institutions that quietly secure something approaching aristocracy in a society that famously decapitates monarchs.

I was in France to lecture about Black religion. If the topic had been religion as such, or theology, I almost certainly would not have been speaking at France’s Princeton and Yale. Even more than in the United States or United Kingdom, France has spent two hundred years silencing discussions of religion under the banner of laïcité, a separation of church and state so extreme that discussion of religious ideas has been almost entirely banished from public higher education. But French elites, not unlike white American elites, have an indulgent curiosity about Black Americans, creating an opening to learn about all of our quirks – so long as the discussion is held at a safe distance from France itself.

Photograph by Franck Prevel / Getty Images.

Being the sort of person who takes pleasure in mild provocation, I asked my hosts about Houria Bouteldja, a French-Algerian Muslim author I had heard about who was making links between Black American Christian political theology and the Islamic political theology of North African immigrants in France. At a café across the street from the École Normale Supérieure, my host, a leftist philosophy professor, barely suppressed a grimace, and quickly pushed the conversation on to other topics. At a vegetarian café, my French-Moroccan host at Sciences Po, a quintessential cosmopolitan who moved with ease between French, English, and Arabic, smoothly navigated the conversation around and away from my queries about Bouteldja. A young researcher with whom I had coffee, who strongly identifies with a radical politics grounded in her North African heritage, finally responded to my inquiries directly, telling me that Bouteldja’s religion and her politics, and her way of conjoining the two, was a bridge too far. It made her uncomfortable in a way she did not quite have the words to explain.

What could it be about Houria Bouteldja that puts even the most radical writers and intellectuals at a loss for words?

On October 17, 1961, thirty thousand peaceful protesters filled the streets of Paris, demanding Algerian independence. The police attacked and killed protesters, throwing their bodies into the River Seine. One hundred and ten corpses were recovered from the river; some estimates put the number of protesters killed at as high as three hundred. The names of many of the murdered remain unknown; the French government has not apologized.

When I learned about the October 17 massacre – embarrassingly, only a few months ago – I thought I must have misread the numbers. My point of reference was the North American violence of those tumultuous years: Kent State, four killed by the National Guard; Orangeburg, three killed by police. There are forty-one names inscribed on the civil rights memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorating those killed in the struggle for racial justice between 1955 and 1968. In the middle of Paris, a thousand feet from Notre-Dame, police killed more than one hundred.

A peculiar feature of twentieth-century US racism is that it divides neatly into the domestic and the international; that is part of its wicked magic. Within the United States, millions of Black Americans are indeed haunted by the threat of racial violence, which happens often enough to serve as a reminder of the depth of racial domination. Outside the United States, racism takes the form of tens of thousands killed in war. By contrast, in France it would seem self-evident that the essential problem of race, the treatment of North Africans, is directly related to the problem of colonialism. It should be unsurprising that the tactics of violence and dehumanization employed in Africa would also be deployed in France itself. Yet until relatively recently, France had little understanding of its own racism.

Sometimes, we only notice the contours of our own world by attending to a world which is distant from our own, but also fundamentally the same.

Both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. realized that racial justice could only be effectively pursued if the division between US internal racism and overseas violence was given the lie. By the late 1960s, inspired by African independence movements, many Black American activists were calling for self-determination rather than integration into what they depicted as an irredeemably racist state and society.

In 2005, inspired by this strand of 1960s Black American radicalism, Houria Bouteldja cofounded a new political movement in France, the Indigenous of the Republic. They called for the political and cultural autonomy of African people in France, acknowledging the extent to which colonialism influenced not only state policy but even the self-understanding of racial minorities themselves, instilling in them the desire to renounce their own traditions and integrate into the white, secular French state. By “Indigenous,” Bouteldja and her collaborators picked up a derogatory term used by French colonizers and flipped its meaning, taking it as a source of pride. It is likely that she also had in mind the strand of Black American thought that mischievously claims indigeneity: think Richard Wright’s Native Son and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son.

Around the same time that the Indigenous of the Republic was founded, French youth from the impoverished outlying districts of Paris rose up, lighting fires, destroying more than eight thousand cars, and clashing with police. More than two thousand were arrested. While not instigated by the Indigenous of the Republic, the new movement gave voice to the youth in the streets, naming and analyzing the hypocrisy of a nation that officially championed equality but actually treated impoverished youth, particularly those whose families had immigrated from Africa, as second-class citizens, if they were treated as citizens at all.

Bouteldja became a much discussed, and often vilified, figure in French culture. She was unsuccessfully sued for “anti-white racism” in 2009, and in 2012 she was attacked by political opponents, who sprayed her with red paint on her way to work. Even many leftist intellectuals in France distanced themselves from her, wary of what they deemed her “racist anti-racism” – her blaming white people generally for colonial, racist violence. Inspired by Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and other Black radicals, Bouteldja is unapologetic in condemning ostensibly progressive activists who do not think enough about the evils of colonialism. She has accused French feminist and LGBT movements of embracing colonial (“white”) understandings of gender and sexuality and imposing them on African immigrants.

The real racists, in Bouteldja’s view, are the elites: they control structures born of the legacies of racism, perpetuating racism. The white working class are scapegoats; in fact, they are subjugated by elites.

The vast majority of African immigrants in France are Muslim, and Bouteldja argues that Islamophobia and racism are, effectively, two names for the same thing. As part of her call for self-determination, she urges her fellow Muslims to be unapologetic about their faith, and at the same time she analyzes instances in which Islam is domesticated by the French state. When it is not obscured by French colonial interests and internalized colonialism, we can see the truth of Islam. As Bouteldja asserted at an interfaith workshop on liberation theology, “One of God’s names is al-‘Adl, which means ‘The Just.’ The idea that my father (may God have mercy on him) transmitted to me is that Islam is fundamentally an ideal of justice.” For a French political culture – right, left, and center – that is dogmatically committed to secularism, the call to entwine Islamic theology and politics may be the most threatening of all the claims Bouteldja makes.

The Indigenous of the Republic, of which Bouteldja served as spokesperson, solidified into a formal organization, although they never participated in electoral politics. They organized rallies and debates, published pamphlets with political analysis, and developed a broad social media following among African immigrants – both North African and from sub-Saharan Africa. While at first the French left was suspicious of the Indigenous of the Republic, 2016 saw the formation of a new political party, France Unbowed, that modeled itself on the Bernie Sanders movement in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn’s vision for the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, and Podemos in Spain. France Unbowed ran on a platform that was meant to appeal to the working class, both in rural, predominantly white communities and in the African immigrant–dominated suburbs around Paris. The result was that some of the ideas and much of the energy that once flowed around the Indigenous of the Republic were channeled into France Unbowed. In 2020 Bouteldja and other key figures formally departed the movement they founded. They have since developed a media project, Words of Honor, that produces YouTube videos and a print magazine.

This is the context in which Bouteldja published her new book, Rednecks and Barbarians: Uniting the White and Racialized Working Class. Like France Unbowed, Bouteldja aims at alliance-building; unlike France Unbowed, she approaches from a framework rooted in Black American and Caribbean traditions, and, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, from a perspective that takes politics and religion to need each other: “The indigenous proposal must be more than political or economic; it must be spiritual.”

Rednecks and Barbarians opens with two epigraphs, one from the Book of Revelation and the other a saying of the prophet Muhammad. This encapsulates Bouteldja’s aspiration to weave together sources that appeal to Christians and to Muslims, finding in each the urgent call of divine justice in desperate times. Ultimately, she names her constructive proposal “revolutionary love.” In a world where systems of domination are interlocking, where capitalism and racism collude, reason makes it seem as if there is no escape. Bouteldja suggests that it is only through faith, or something like it, that we are motivated to work toward justice. Simone Weil is a favorite of hers, and she takes Weil’s words as a mandate: “It may be that France now has to choose between her attachment to her empire and the need to have a soul of her own again.”

Yet Bouteldja is no theologian. She pursues rigorous, dialectical historical analysis as far as it can go, and then, instead of stopping, turns toward the spiritual and the aesthetic to envision possibilities beyond what reason alone will allow. The first chapter in Rednecks and Barbarians presents a history of the modern state, demonstrating how colonialism and racism have always been at its core – even when the state presents itself as founded on freedom, equality, and fraternity. The second chapter tells a parallel story, that of the state’s leftist opponents. Bouteldja argues that the history of the French left is, similarly, a story about how those ostensibly committed to social transformation in the direction of justice are actually committed to maintaining the racist, colonial status quo. Her storytelling in both chapters is dialectical: there are moments of opportunity, moments when it seemed like anti-racism might win out, but those moments were folded into the racist status quo.

Where Bouteldja’s earlier work argued for “indigenous self-determination” in the face of the stranglehold of racism, Rednecks and Barbarians shifts the emphasis. Now Bouteldja is concerned with the way anti-racism has been institutionalized by the state, and how the state and cultural elites ascribe racism to the white working class (“rednecks”). The real racists, in Bouteldja’s view, are the elites: they control structures born of the legacies of racism, perpetuating racism. The white working class are scapegoats; in fact, they are subjugated by elites.

She describes ordering food delivery and being surprised to see a white courier. She felt so bad for the humiliation faced by that white man doing a job usually held by immigrants that she ran after him with an extra tip. She takes this to represent a widely held intuition about barbarian-redneck solidarity. African immigrants can feel sorry for working-class whites who suffer similar economic hardships but have no thick traditions to bring them comfort.

This is where leftists often get stuck. Even if they acknowledge the situation of the white working class, they find every solution that is not merely economic to be distasteful. Bouteldja names this feeling, and seeks to overcome it. In her account, the left “wants to keep its hands clean, white, and immaculate; it does not want to take any risks, only continue to gaze at its own reflection.” What we need, Bouteldja asserts, and what spiritual resources prepare us for, is to become people “who consent to impurity and to getting splashed with shit.”

Bouteldja gives us one example of how her proposal cashes out in today’s politics. She thinks France should exit the European Union. In her view, the EU is a haven of cultural elites, and its policies negatively affect both African immigrants and working-class whites. Mobilizing against the EU could build the sorts of alliances she sees as essential. Will France outside of the EU be a more equitable and just place? She acknowledges that the answer is uncertain. However, it seems likely that the field of political contest would open up, that there would be more space for Africans and working-class whites to pursue their interests, to experiment with political projects, and, ultimately, to envision a future beyond the terms of the present.

This past October 17 in Paris, there was a light but persistent drizzle. I had forgotten my umbrella, so Bouteldja held hers above both of us as walked to the banks of the River Seine to join a memorial event for the protestors killed in 1961.

An hour before, I had met Bouteldja at her workplace. She is not a professional activist or writer; she works in the French government bureaucracy, renting meeting rooms at a cultural center to corporations. (“They are very expensive,” she noted.) By day, she sits in a warren of cubicles and offices, but even there she stands out. When I met her, she punctured a sea of business casual, wearing what I assume was a traditional Algerian dress and headscarf. (The French desire to ban Islamic head coverings has been a prime point of contention in the struggle against Islamophobia. Bouteldja sometimes, but not always, wears one.) She took me to one of the rooms she rents, with a spectacular view of Paris’s most famous sites. Pointing to the Panthéon, she wryly observed, “That’s where all the great criminals are buried.”

Over tea in her cubicle, we compared impressions of Black American intellectuals. We agreed that Angela Davis was a powerful and important voice – she had spoken at an event for the Indigenous of the Republic – but Bouteldja thought Davis was not adapting to changing times and I thought Davis held too closely to the atheism of her Communist youth. In conversation, as in her writing, Bouteldja is precise and definitive. She has a disarming confidence. She makes you want to take her concepts and reasoning as your own.

On our way out of her office, Bouteldja laughed with her coworkers about the quotidian realities of work life. She introduced me to them, slightly proud, I think, that an American had come to see her. Then we were in the rain, and at the bridge where the bodies of the hundred were pushed into the river. Perhaps four dozen people mingled, a mix of North Africans, old white leftists, and young white leftists. They all knew Bouteldja, and she talked with some, but she was not encircled by admirers. Her media organization, Words of Honor, was filming a YouTube video on the sidelines, but she was not in the camera’s spotlight.

After a quiet half hour, a band started to play. This was not like protests in the United States, where there may be a couple young men with homemade drums. Here there were trumpets and trombones and clarinets. Bouteldja chatted with the musicians and told me that they were going to try a traditional Algerian folk song. It was fast and festive, and many in the crowd knew the words. After its climax, ululations all around. Then an older man burst in front of the musicians, gesturing and yelling at them. With a faint smile, Bouteldja explained: the man said we should be mourning, not singing jubilantly. The man finished his complaint, walked away, and the buoyant music resumed. A few of us in the rain, at once mourning and celebrating a new world to come.