Liberté denied: the other side of freedom

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As the world rallies its sympathies around France and all the Enlightenment ideals the French Republic reminds us of, there are some other things we might want to keep in mind while talking about French society: like racism.

Zoulikha Echaïb, who fought for Algerian independence, executed on October 25, 1957

France held on to its last major colony Algeria until the Algerians were able to win a bloody war for independence — in 1962. (Around that time, French flags flew over 1/3 of the African continent, a total land area near the size of Europe.) The French for the most part viewed the Algerians as barbaric Muslims in barbaric North Africa in need of some civilizing. They pitied Algerian women, doomed “to produce brats” while “Islam holds its prey”, and Muslim girls in French colonial schools were taught to throw away their veils, symbols to the French of Algeria’s backwardness. French soldiers would force Muslim women to take off their veils for portraits and photographs (and occasionally postcards), a practice of “liberation” that persisted even in the 1960s. Unsurprisingly, many women in Algeria (like the prisoner photographed above) volunteered to fight for independence from France, and would conceal weapons and explosives underneath their clothing for the rebels.

Map of French colonies in Africa and the years of their independence (Madagascar not shown)

Even after losing their North African/Muslim colonies, France has continually reduced civil liberties for Muslims (using “Laïcité”, the French tradition of secularism, as a rationale). The small minority (less than 10%) of Muslim women who choose to wear the veil were recently banned from wearing full body burqas in public by criminal law, and girls are banned from wearing headscarves in school (there are many cases of students expelled for this reason). North Africans, Arabs, and generations of black immigrants consistently number amongst France’s poorest and most unemployed, and make up the majority of the housing projects in Paris, where in 2005 riots began (triggered by the police-related deaths of two teenagers) and led to the arrest of over 2,800 people.

Electoral map of the EU elections, showing areas won by the Front National

The immigration debate in France also revolves around North African immigration, generally from former colonies where large portions of people still speak French. Except now, it is the North Africans who are invading France and trying to steal away social and economic benefits of citizenship, at least according to the narrative of right-wing parties like the Front National (which believes in deporting unemployed immigrants, just won 25% of the seats in France’s delegation to the EU Parliament, and of course is a vocal defender of laïcité).

Muslims (and people who appear Muslim or African) also face violent persecution. Incidents like this assault on a pregnant Muslim woman resulting in the loss of her baby reflect France’s history of racism. Notice how the men stripped away her veil, and when learning she was pregnant, began kicking at her stomach. And this story too, of a 16-year-old Muslim girl who tried killing herself by jumping out a window after being sexually assaulted. She recounts:

French postcard depicting a common colonial fantasy of removing the veil, by Jean Geiser (1848–1923)

“The first man started to touch my chest and then I managed to slap him, but then he punched me in the chest. He then took out a sharp object and started to cut my face with short, quick movements”

If it seems that these men might be anomalous criminals with a personal history of sexual assault, don’t be so quick to look past the historical connections. The assault on the pregnant woman parallels colonial attitudes toward Muslims (who “produce brats”). And it was French colonists in North Africa who invented the stereotype of the harem (through staged photographs made to be sold as postcards), along with many other tropes of orientalism. As other scholars have explained using first-hand documentation and accounts, the fetishization and objectification of Muslim women, the veil, and bodies of color were fundamental components of colonialism. Depictions of women from other French African colonies (like Madagascar) weren’t much better.

Child at a protest in Islamabad, Pakistan, 2011

At every level of life, from the home, to the school, to the workplace, to the marketplace of ideas — France polices its communities of color with the same racism of its colonial history. This past Wednesday, the world said that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was an attack on France, and according to many, it was also an attack on freedom. But whose freedom? Whose France? I’m not French. I’ve never lived in France. But I don’t have to be reborn as a French-Algerian Muslim to understand her struggle and recognize her injustice. And it is hypocrisy, even insult, to tell her she is free while her country has stripped her people of their homeland, of their rights to free speech, and of their own clothes.