HOW TO BE FRENCH: NATIONALITY IN THE MAKING SINCE 1789 by PATRICK WEIL
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Author | JEREMY JENNINGS |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2009.00485.x |
HOW TO BE FRENCH: NATIONALITY IN THE MAKING SINCE 1789 by
PATRICK WEIL
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008, 456 pp., £70.00 (hbk)
£17.99 (pbk))
In How To Be French,Patrick Weil has produced an admirable book. He has
also written a very important book, one which will serve as the standard
work of reference on issues relating to French nationality for some years. His
scholarship is a model of clarity and his judgements are never less than wise
and well-informed. There is a very useful glossary and the footnotes are
compendious. To cap it all, Weil has also had the good fortune of finding an
excellent translator in Catherine Porter. At no point did I doubt the accuracy
of her translation.
If Weil's book is important, it is also timely. Over the last twenty years or
so, debates about nationality and citizenship have run like an open sore
through the French body politic and only now, with the right-wing President
Sarkozy in power, has the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen faded.
During this time policy makers ± including Weil himself who, in 1997, wrote
a report on French nationality and immigration policy for the then French
Prime Minster ± have struggled to meet the conflicting and often unpleasant
demands made upon them by an increasingly irascible French electorate. Not
only this, but at the same time, the French academic community has been
struggling to find responses to the issues posed to the dominant republican
tradition by what is now a de facto multicultural society. The long-standing
debate about the wearing of the Muslim hijab or headscarf ± explored most
recently by CeÂcile Laborde in her book Critical Republicanism ± has been
only one aspect of a continuing debate about what it means to be French and
about the rights and obligations entailed by French citizenship. To simplify
matters somewhat, it might be said that the dominant position within the
republican camp has been that the concepts of both race and ethnicity have
no place in what it means to be French and thus should not operate as factors
defining membership of the political community. Such a view has received
what is probably its clearest and most articulate expression in a series of
books by Dominique Schnapper (see, for example, La France de
l'inte
Âgration, published in 1991).
A key component of this vision has been that belonging to the French
nation entails not only a commitment to the body politic but also a vocation
towards universalism. On this view, from the Revolution of 1789 onwards,
France has been a model to the rest of the world, the supreme example of an
inclusive political community. The same argument usually involves a com-
parison with the exclusive and closed conception of nationality associated
until very recently with Germany. The major achievement of Weil's book is
that it cuts right through these myths and, in great detail, shows not only how
the law relating to French nationality has evolved over the last two hundred
years but also how French nationality law has incorporated an astonishing
585
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School
To continue reading
Request your trial