He could almost have invented the word “francitude”. A neologism, not to say a barbarism, singular and provocative, but which could get the debate on immigration out of the ruts in which it has been floundering for years. Who better than Daniel Cohn-Bendit, this stateless person of German origin, who became French late in life, almost like a snub to his own history, could have stuck to this task? In an exciting book (“French, but not Gaul”, Robert Laffont), written with four hands, with Patrick Lemoine, Dany le Rouge, engaged in a cautious macronism, kneads in a form of joyful irony the concept of French identity . The book is timely, a few days before the debate on immigration that Parliament will address through Gérald Darmanin’s bill.
According to Dany and his accomplice, French identity is a mirage, an illusion, a notion that its flatterers confine to a territory, an ancestry, land borders, an immemorial culture. For the former deputy mayor of Frankfurt, then in charge of immigration issues, we have to go back to Ernest Renan, to his speech at the Sorbonne, “What is a nation? », in which he develops the idea that a country is a complex and magical addition of people from here and elsewhere.
“Man is not a slave to his language, nor to his religion, nor to the course of rivers, nor to the direction of mountain ranges, writes the philologist. But an aggregation of men, sane in mind and warm in heart, […] a moral conscience which is called a nation. »
Aggregation, you say? To unravel the thread of Renan’s thought, the former icon of May-68 reviews the multitude of famous immigrants who came to offer France their arms, their sweat, and also their genius, such as the Polish Marie Curie, born Maria Salomea Sklodowska, Nobel Prize in Physics, or the Russians Chagall, Zadkine, Soutine, the Spaniard Pablo Picasso. And so many others. The procession of “French people from other lands” is immeasurable.
A wink from Serge Raffy
To read this inventory which tells a century of immigration through famous personalities, until the last waves from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, with the Zidane, Benzema, Omar Sy, Mbappé, without forgetting the Poles, Italians, Portuguese , it would almost make you dizzy. It reveals the incredible wealth of France, its ability to welcome others. Some will consider the book worthy of the collection of little pink books, erasing the growing difficulties of the state to integrate the latest waves of immigrants. It reminds us at least that tragedy is not in front of us, that the notion of “francitude” is a land to be explored with determination, even with stubbornness, so as not to be devoured by the fears distilled daily by Eric Zemmour and his followers. The French attitude, what is it? A moral conscience, as Renan claims? The love of the flag? Creolization, according to Mélenchon? The patriotism of Manuel Valls? Dany Cohn-Bendit, the German Jew naturalized French, launches a building site that we know to be explosive and politically dangerous. He has the merit of bringing his humanist touch and his scathing irony. It is always good to take….
