[However, for much of the rest of the world — extending from the Antilles to Northern, Western and Central Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia — the French are seen as practiced killers and torturers, whose lovely and refined language is used not to describe a sumptuous creamy sauce or a plunging neckline on an evening dress, let alone for courting and flirtation, but rather to inflict pain and suffering on untold millions. Yet the dominant French culture insists on seeing itself through its own eyes, and most French people are appalled that anyone in the world would even question their refined and rosy image of themselves. Colonial barbarities The reason for this contrast is a matter of both history and present French policies. Let us start with the historical: a report on French colonial atrocities in Indochina for the years 1930-33, following the outbreak of the Yen Bay mutiny in February 1930, lists some of the monstrous torture methods dear to French officers. According to the famed French activist Andrée Viollis, the torture methods included — in addition to the use of electricity — deprivation of food, bastinado (the whipping of the soles of the feet), pins hammered under the nails, half-hangings, deprivation of water and pincers on the temples (forcing the eyes outward) among others. A more delicate method included the use of “a razor blade, to cut the skin of the legs in long furrows, to fill the wound with cotton and then burn the cotton.” In 1947-48, the French colonial authorities went on a rampage in Madagascar, killing and raping the population, and torching whole villages, as punishment for the Nationalist Malagasy uprising. Some of the more specifically French practices and torture specialties unleashed on the people of Madagascar included “death flights,” where people would be thrown from military planes in the middle of the sea to drown and become “disappeared.” This murderous method was such a proud French specialty that the French colonial authorities in Algeria would continue its use several years later during the Battle of Algiers in 1956-57. In the Algerian case, French paratroopers decided to modify the method when corpses of Algerians began to surface, exposing the practice. The modification consisted of attaching concrete blocks to the feet of the victims to ensure their sinking permanently (the US-supported Argentinian generals would find this very helpful to their efforts in suppressing resistance to their dictatorship in the late 1970s). These are not ad hoc methods of torture that the French devised on the spot, but well-studied and well-practiced cruelties. In the Algeria of the nineteenth century, General Saint-Arnaud would burn Algerian revolutionaries alive in caves and his soldiers would rape Algerian women, as would French soldiers throughout the Algerian revolution of the 1950s and early 1960s. Estimates of those the French killed include a million Vietnamese and a million Algerians. As for Madagascar, estimates have it that upwards of 100,000 people were killed by the French. These are just a few examples of French colonial barbarities in some colonies and not an exhaustive list by any means. French colonialism, under the grandiose heading of a mission civilisatrice, has clearly failed to civilize, most of all, the French themselves. The mission, it would seem, remains unaccomplished! Secular Catholicism The matter of how the French are perceived is not limited only to history but is relevant to the present. While assimilating the natives into the ways of the colonizing French was the core of the French colonial program, this philosophy has come to haunt the French after they partially retreated from the colonies and found that immigrant Africans, Arabs and Indochinese, among others, are not “assimilable” into the ways of the “French.” It seems that only German, Russian, Spanish, Italian and certainly Hungarian immigrants to France can be assimilated now into French society, but not the darker and especially non-Christian immigrants. The massacre of French Algerians committed by the French police in October 1961, which was clearly inspired by the “death flights” specialty of the French army in Algeria and Madagascar, resulted in the killing of upwards of 200 Muslim demonstrators (some estimates go as high as 400) by shooting them dead or throwing them in the River Seine. It took the Catholic-dominated French government until 1998 to acknowledge that the police killed a mere 40 of the 200 to 400 French Muslims. Victims of the French Catholic-dominated government see such barbaric and cruel acts as a main feature of French Catholic culture, indeed as definitional of it. And not only is this not exclusive to French Muslims (French colonial authorities invented the category of “Français musulmans” in nineteenth century Algeria to legally require Algerians to denounce “Islamic law,” including polygamy, in order to have access to full French citizenship), French Jews too understand French Catholic anti-Semitism as a central feature of French Catholic culture. After all, French Jews had been subjected by Napoleon in 1806 to a similar litmus — or is it Catholic? — test by which they had to allay his fears that Jewish polygamy and divorce laws that contradicted French state laws would not be practiced as a condition for Jewish emancipation. Of course these state laws just happened to be in line with Catholic monogamy, but not with Jewish polygamy. Yet the French continue to see and present themselves to the world and to themselves as sensitive and pensive lovers, engagé intellectuals and defenders of secularism, or “laïcité”! It is this last point that has become part of the official and unofficial racist and sectarian campaigns by the reigning French Catholics, “laïcs” of course, against French Muslims, let alone Muslims outside France. It is there that French Muslims are thought of as somehow having geographic, religious and cultural origins outside France, something of which French citizens of Italian, German, Russian, Spanish or Hungarian immigrant origins are never accused. If the French Catholics insisted that Algerian Muslims and Jews must become French in Algeria under French rule (French Jews of Algerian background are said to have successfully made the transition since the 1870 Crémieux decree which transformed them legally from Algerians into French citizens, a status that was later revoked under the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Second World War, revealing the tenuousness of French Catholic tolerance), the same French Catholics would insist that French people of Algerian Muslim background in France must also assimilate into some phantasmatic Frenchness that is allegedly secular or “laïc” and definitely not Christian.]
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:52:07 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015