Professors Divided over Paris Street Riots

As France faces national riots that represent the country’s most severe civil unrest in decades, Harvard professors say the French government must address the joblessness and discrimination that afflicts the country’s minority population.

The riots, which stretched into their 12th night, claimed their first life yesterday and 1,400 vehicles were burned in 274 towns across France, authorities said. The violence began Oct. 27 in a Paris suburb when two teenage boys of African origin died from accidental electrocution while hiding from police.

France’s prime minister said authorities will impose curfews and marshal police reservists to quell the violence’s rapid spread. But some Harvard faculty said yesterday that French leaders should be focusing on integrating its marginalized minority population into society.

They offered conflicting perspectives on how France should begin this task. Some advocated a melting-pot approach like the United States has taken, while others advocated a multicultural approach that focuses on community identities.

Visiting Professor of Government Stefan Collignon—who has taught at the London School of Economics, in Paris, and elsewhere in Europe—said the riots were precipitated by “institutions that aren’t working properly anymore.”

“French people don’t trust the government to defend their interests properly,” he said.

Collignon added that the French government must target the isolation causing the nation’s chronic unemployment and job discrimination.

Tisch Professor of History Niall C. D. Ferguson said the marginalization of France’s ethnic population is its most critical issue, adding that France should consider the American model of assimilating immigrant and ethnic populations, even though “it will pain the French to do it.”

“In France, there is an assumption that immigrants should retain their previous cultures and not become part of an integrated French culture,” he said. “In the United States, immigrants are fundamentally and consciously turned into Americans as part of the citizenship process.”

Ferguson—who has written widely about globalization and published an op-ed yesterday in the Los Angeles Times about the riots—added that he sees this assimilation process as monocultural, not multicultural.

“The citizenship process makes systematic efforts to teach immigrants about political culture and history of the U.S. in a way that I would describe as distinctly positive,” he said. “Multiculturalism,” as Ferguson added, “avoids grappling with the problem of social integration [and] allows ghettoes to develop.”

Timothy Smith, a professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada who has written a book on French inequality, said the United States could form a model for France but emphasized the need for multiculturalism to unify France’s disparate ethnic groups.

“The French ask newcomers to leave all cultural baggage at the borders,” he said. “But, this request doesn’t hold any water in the suburbs of Paris. Newly immigrated peoples are not able to jettison their religious and cultural identities.

The French must become more open to celebrating France’s diversity instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.”

Marie-France Bunting, a preceptor in Romance Languages and Literatures who is French, concurred with the need to embrace multiculturalism.

“If anything, the riots show a part of the society that people want to ignore,” she said. “Something else has to be done.”

Smith added that while French leaders have derided the American economic system for years, he “wonder[s] if they still think that” in light of France’s chronic unemployment.

But Buttenwieser University Professor Stanley Hoffman, who is French, said that the French economic system reflects different cultural priorities, including job security and more vacation time.

“In America, you are hired quickly and fired quickly,” he said. “There is an attempt to protect labor in France from the vagaries of the market.”