Comics and the Demystification of France's Immigration ‘Problem’: Reading Christophe Dabitch's Immigrants

Abstract

While universalism constitutes the foundation of French republicanism, public discourse and changes in immigration law have revealed that racial and/or ethnic discrimination and exclusion are necessary for cultural assimilation and for the protection of France's ‘universalist’ model. Studies have also shown that at least 40% of the French population is of foreign origin. So how has France justified the reconciliation of universalism and particularism (now referred to as communitarianism) in certain instances but not others? Christophe Dabitch's collaborative comic-book project, Immigrants (2010), aims to deconstruct the French republican narrative of universalism by using a popular medium that is both transcultural and transnational. An effective collage of visual styles, reproduced testimony and scholarship on immigration in France, Dabitch's album proposes writing an alternative French history of immigration and invites readers to question founding mythologies which have erected France as the country of human rights. This article has three objectives: to present Immigrants as a serious historical and artistic project on immigration; to critically examine this publication's purpose (can comics effectively demonstrate that immigration is a common but significant aspect of nation building?); and to explore how comics can positively re-imagine France as a métropole cosmopolite, as an international point of convergence.

Quoique l'universalisme constitue la base du républicanisme français, le discours public et les changements apportés aux lois en matière de l'immigration révèlent que la discrimination et l'exclusion sont nécessaires à l'assimilation et à la sauvegarde du modèle universaliste en France. Or des études montrent qu'au moins 40 % de la population française est d'origine étrangère. Alors comment la France justifie-t-elle la réconciliation de l'universalisme et du particularisme (désormais désigné «communautarisme») dans certains cas, mais non dans d'autres ? Le projet collaboratif de Christophe Dabitch, Immigrants, vise à déconstruire le discours républicain qui repose sur l'universalisme en utilisant la bande dessinée qui s'avère transculturelle et transnationale. Un mélange d'esthétiques, de témoignages et d'études universitaires sur l'immigration en France, la bande dessinée de Dabitch nous propose de réécrire l'histoire de l'immigration et nous invite à mettre en question les mythes fondateurs qui ont érigé la France en pays des droits de l'homme. Cet article a donc trois objectifs: présenter Immigrants comme un projet historico-artistique sérieux; examiner de façon critique le but de cette publication (la bande dessinée peut-elle normaliser l'immigration dans l'histoire d'une nation ?); explorer la manière dont la bande dessinée peut reconstruire la France dans l'imagination collective comme un métropole cosmopolite.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^[1] See, for example, Farid Boudjellal'sLe Beurgeois. In this album, Boudjellal successfully navigates ‘entre la dénonciation des discriminations raciales en France et la dénonciation de l'arrivisme de certains “self-made men” de la nouvelle classe des Beurs’ (Reyns 2011, 2). Despite such attempts to ‘decolonise’ French comics, Mark McKinney acknowledges ‘the colonial and racist bases of French comics, including those by cartoonists designated as founding fathers’ (2011, 28–29). In The Colonial Heritage of French Comics, McKinney demonstrates the frequency with which negative stereotypical representations of the cultural Other have appeared in influential comic-book series such as Alain Saint-Ogan's Zig et Puce and Hergé's Tintin. The latter's depiction of the Congolese in Tintin au Congo—which reflects common European stereotypes of black Africans held in the early twentieth century—has sparked considerable controversy and resulted in efforts to ban the album in Sweden and the United Kingdom.

^[2] Christophe Dabitch recently published a similar collected volume titled Être là avec Amnesty International (Dabitch et al. 2014), whose aim is to familiarise readers with the organisation's numerous and diverse operations all over the world.

^[3] For more information on how decisions regarding asylum are made in France, see Jean-Philippe Dequen's 2013 article ‘Constructing the Refugee Figure in France: Ethnomethodology of a Decisional Process’.

^[4] Contemporary cartoonists and novelists have already broached this topic in their work, often in an attempt to deconstruct the myth of sports and immigration. Baru's (2010) comic book Fais péter les basses, Bruno! and Fatou Diome's (2003) novel Le Ventre de l'Atlantique use the utopian dreams of Senegalese boys aspiring to a professional soccer career in Europe to explore the harsh realities of African immigration in France. For example, after being recruited, Baru's hopeful athlete travels to France in the checked luggage compartment of an airplane and later emerges as a clandestin on French soil. Mark McKinney's interest in Baru's album stems from its equally brutal representation of North African immigrants living in post-colonial France (McKinney 2013a).

^[5] In Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria, Patricia M. E. Lorcin ([1995] 1999) defines the Kabyle Myth as a way to differentiate between and, ultimately, to establish a racial hierarchy among Kabyles (a subset of the Berber population) and Arabs: ‘The French used sociological differences and religious disparities between the two groups to create an image of the Kabyle which was good and one of the Arab which was bad and, from this, to extrapolate that the former was more suited to assimilation than the latter. The myth was an assimilationist one in so far as it provided an ideological basis for absorbing the Kabyles into French colonial society to the detriment of the Arabs. It was also a racial myth, for the intellectual concepts of this ideology were essentially ones of race’ ([1995] 1999, 2–3).

^[6] According to the Musée de l'Histoire de l'Immigration in Paris: ‘Choisir “ses” immigrés pour le pays d'accueil consiste à privilégier les travailleurs, qualifiés et ceux susceptibles d'être les plus utiles à l'économie nationale. L'immigration “choisie” est opposée à une immigration “subie” ou, pour reprendre le mot des associations opposées à cette politique [celle de Sarkozy], à une immigration “jetable”. Cette dernière est constituée d'hommes et de femmes qui entrent en France pour des raisons familiales ou comme demandeurs d'asile, celles et ceux qui seraient soupçonnés de bénéficier du système social ou qui ne représenteraient pas ou peu d'intérêt économique et professionnel’ (Harzoune 2012).

^[7] Contributors to another collective comic-book project, Paroles sans papiers, reference Noiriel's scholarship for the same reason. According to contributors, ‘Gérard Noiriel indique que depuis la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, les immigrés ont construit 90 % des autoroutes françaises, une machine sur sept, et un logement sur deux’ (Chauvel et al. 2007, 64). Noiriel's research suggests that France's infrastructures would never have been built had it not been for immigrant labour. This claim finds resonance in other comics on French immigration such as Manu Larcenet's Le Combat ordinaire. Partway through the album, a female character of North African heritage comments on Le Pen's and the National Front's disquieting success in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections: ‘Les Français ont tellement peur pour leurs maisons qu'ils en oublient que ce sont nos parents qui les ont construites’ (Larcenet and Larcenet [2003] 2008, 38).