Hargreaves, "Perceptions of Ethnic Difference in Post-War France"

16 Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France
that she was born in France of Maghrebi parentage, for Beur was synonymous
with proletarian origins (in contrast with the middle-class status of Ben Jelloun)
and signified continuing social disadvantage: "'Beur' automatically means the
banlieue, a dead-end world, problems of social adjustment, etc." (Spear 33).tt
Many second-generation Maghrebi authors raised in this milieu have experienced
and written about the stigmatization of the banlieue, a stigmatization that has
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PROCESSES
France is often said to have an assimilationist tradition in relation to
immigrant minorities. Like the idea of France as a country where ethnicity has
no public role, this too is a half truth. Compared with other countries such as
Germany, France has certainly been more open to the permanent settlement of
immigrants and has made access to citizenship relatively easy. But there has
never been unanimous support for these policies, and at times contrary positions
have gained considerable momentum. At a popular level, the stigmatization of
the banlieues is symptomatic of these exclusionary tendencies. Moreover, even
when a basically assimilationist approach has been pursued--as has generally
been the case in educational and cultural policies--it has not always had the
steamroller effect frequently attributed to it.
For instance, it is now almost a century since a significant part of the
Armenian diaspora settled in France following the massacres carried out in their
homeland during World War I. Three or four generations later, a strong sense of
ethnic specificity remains present among the descendants of Armenian refugees.
Their lobbying power was sufficiently strong to persuade the French National
Assembly to pass a resolution in 1998 officially recognizing the massacres of
1915 as geno"ldal in nature.rt Youri Djorkaeff, one of two players of Armenian
descent in the soccer squad that brought France her World Cup victory a few
weeks later, said he had been inspired by the National Assembly vote to score
during the tournament. In a report on Djorkaeff s close links with the Armenian
minority in the Lyons suburb of D6cines, a journalist in Le Monde described it
as "a community constantly referred to in the banlieues of Lyons as a model of
integration, faithful both to its cultural roots and to France, venerated as a second
homeland" (Tincq).'e
The same report noted it had not always been thus: "Sitting down to a
dish of tchi keufte [raw meat], the older ones [Armenians] recall the time when
their classmates treated them as 'animals' because they ate raw meat and vine
leaves" (Tincq).2o Many other Europeans in that age group had been treated with
similar disdain and labelled as "unassimilable" while working or growing up in
France, especially during periods of heightened economic insecurity. Frangois
Cavanna, for example, has written eloquently of the jig,es and discrimination
suffered by the Italian minority during the 1930s slump.'' During the same period,
Poles who had been hired ten or fifteen years earlier to plug gaps in the
labor force left by the carnage of World War I were branded as unassimilable
(sometimes on the grounds that they brouqht their own Catholic priests with
them!) and were repatriated by the trainload."
While generally pursuing an assimilationist policy, the authorities in
France have always retained and have sometimes been tempted to use reserve