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"Sérigne? What kinda name is that?"
By BERNARD CHAZELLE

Whenever the fortune cookie fails to sate my literary appetite, I turn my voracious mind to the American state motto for nutrients. Consider Maine's sweetly delusional "I Lead," for example. It may lack the gangsta rap spirit of New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die," but it stirringly bugles the battle cry that feeds the famished soul. Or take Maryland;loosed from the shackles of good writing, the Old Line State flies high the banner of phallic pride: "Manly Deeds, Womanly Words"-its cloying way of saying "Maryland ain't Mary's land." Hats off to New Mexico's "It Grows As It Goes" for boldly going where no motto should: the snappy rhyme of a viagra jingle. No such chutzpah from the Kansas prairie. Humble to a fault, and no doubt aware of how much it has be humble about, the Creationist State penned its motto to read like a school report card: "To the Stars Through Difficulty." (If Kansas' new science curriculum is any guide, expect difficulty to prevail and the stars to be safe.) But it is to the Potato State, Idaho, that the grand prize goes, for "Let It Be Perpetual" may well be the nearest thing to an anthem masochism will ever have.

France's rallying cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" shuns literary aspirations for the comfort of platitudes. The early years of the French Revolution experimented with the more Dr Dre-ish "Liberty, Equality, or Death," but an unhealthy focus on the last item (not to mention the mangled rhyme) led to the F-word substitution. My college-age reader-I don't use the plural form to avoid sounding boastful-will surely wonder how fraternity, that codeword for all-night boozing, stumbled its way onto the hallowed grounds of a national motto. This, my young friend, is wonderment at its best! Equality is the DNA of the French Republic-its innate belief. Liberty is its ideology-its chosen belief. Fraternity is its answer to the deepest question in moral philosophy: why bother?

A safety tip: should you one day be ordered at gunpoint to explain the provenance of the French motto in 10 seconds or else, you could do worse than say: "From the Enlightenment flows liberty; from the family equality; and from the Bible fraternity." Then run. Liberty and equality are twin values doomed to live in perpetual tension. It is their sibling rivalry-not the relative merits of Yorkshire pudding and sauteed frog legs-that explains why the French and the Brits orbit in different planetary systems. This cosmological oddity did not escape Tocqueville's attention: "The French wish not to have superiors; the English wish to have inferiors."

For this, blame (who else?) the parents. Since the 17th century, the French peasant family has been governed by egalitarian inheritance rules that ensure the children equal shares of the loot. No such strictures across the Channel where, armed with that favorite cinematic device, the will, English parents have jealously guarded their freedom to screw over their least-favored kids.

This, argues the eminent historian Emmanuel Todd, is the reason egalitarianism is inscribed in the French DNA in big block letters [1, 2]. Ever pondered why the French commiserate with transit workers who leave them stranded in the rain all day? Ever puzzled over their indifference toward five-time Tour de France winner, Bernard Hinault, and adulation of zero-time winner, Raymond Poulidor? Wonder no more: that the French don't need inferiors explains the commiseration; that they can't stand superiors accounts for the indifference. Todd links it all up to the equality-obsessed 17th-c Bassin Parisien.

Who's this Emmanuel Todd, you ask? And what does he bring to the French table that, say, National Review's resident Francomaniac Jonah Goldberg can't swat away? Whom are we to trust: Todd, who foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union years ahead of everyone else; or Goldberg, who became a legend in neocon circles for never letting an Upper West Side cocktail party go by without correctly predicting which of the cheese dips would run out first?

But I digress. Under the monarchy, the egalitarian impulse of the French ran smack against its two nemeses: the king and the Church. The Bastille storming tipped off the royals to get ready for their curtain call. That was the easy part. The clergy proved a tougher nut to crack. To the bishops' chagrin, the Republic had cast its eye on the public school as its instrument of self-reproduction. Hell hath no fury like a Jesuit scorned, and it took nearly a hundred years of bitter struggle for the Church to comply with its eviction notice and "privatize" its schools. To this day, teachers across the land will curl up in bed misty-eyed as they reminisce about the trench warfare their heroic forebears fought in the name of laïcité (secularism).

Remember this next time you scratch your head wondering why all the fuss about veiled schoolgirls. Face it, a century-long jihad against the nun's cornet can blind a man to the charms of the hijab. More to the point, the Republic claims a monopoly on the definition of equality which the hijab challenges on two grounds: religious and chromosomal. (The irony is that a Catholic school will let a Muslim girl wear the hijab.) To ban "ostensible religious symbols" from the public school is one and the same with the inheritance rules of the French peasantry: within the unit of self-reproduction, be it the family or the public school, equality trumps liberty. Of course, in this case, not a lot of trumping is required since coercion is pretty much the essence of a school anyway-a point hijabists seem to have missed.

But why single out religious garb? If, in the name of equality, clothing should not advertise one's religion, why should it be allowed to flaunt one's social class? If the hijab can't make it to school then why should the crocodile, the swoosh, or the polo horse? In fact, why not revert to school uniforms? France has shown little patience for the multicultural exoticism of female circumcision, polygamy, and separate schooling for Muslim girls-rightly so. But the veil law? Isn't this sartorial fixation just a creative way of being ineffective and offensive at the same time? Won't the law fill madrassas with young girls keen to be schooled in the divine secrets of the Jihad Sisterhood?

Unlikely. But France is no stranger to the precept that when theory clashes with reality, reality should gracefully bow out. Mere expedience stands no chance against the dogma of égalité. Why such attachment to an abstraction? Because the French Republic, like the American version, is universalist: to be French is, above all, to adhere to a creed. That it helps to be white and non-Muslim is not a feature of the creed but a quirk of its adherents.

Of course, quirk is a mild word when it comes to hate lover, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Genius is more like it; for what else do you call a mongrel whose yappings persuade millions of half-breed chihuahuas to stand on their hind legs and yelp for breed purity? Le Pen is not even a French name, so one can always hope for the day he will decide to ethnically cleanse himself. But don't count on it. Frenchmen like to think of themselves as "Best in Show" but often forget their breed group: the mutt.

French blood has all the purity of an overflowing wine-tasting spittoon. No European country is as ethnically mixed as France: one citizen out of five has a foreign parent or grandparent; nearly one out of two has foreign ancestry dating back to the 19th or 20th century [3, 4]; the density of foreign-born-the highest in Europe-is virtually identical to that of the United States [5, 6]. More striking still, half of all immigrant couples are racially mixed [7] and a quarter of all French women of Algerian descent marry non-Muslims [8]. By comparison, only 2 percent of African-American women marry outside their race and 5 percent of Britain's South-Asian women do so [9, 10].

Why the difference? French racism is widespread and a major cause of the current crisis. More xenophobic than chromophobic, however, it keeps a healthy distance from the kind of "white race" paranoia that would lead 16 states in the US to ban interracial marriage as recently as 1967. As Harvard sociologist Michèle Lamont writes, "This [fieldwork] suggests a form of racism that is surprising to many Americans; it does not center on skin color per se" [11]. French racism is the fear of the Other who won't be us; American racism is the fear of the Other who will. This singularity partly explains French skepticism toward multiculturalism. This mouthful of a word is widely construed in France as a segregationist device for turning a society of citizens into a menagerie of caged exotica. It stands accused of promoting a "theme park" approach to cosmopolitanism, whereby adding multi to cultural is the quickest way to transition from Homer's Odyssey to Hoboken's Annual Moussaka Parade.

* * *

First grade, first day of school.
The teacher, she asks me "What's your name?
I say "Sérigne."
"Sérigne? What kinda name is that?"
I dunno what kinda name is that.
Did she ask Jean-Baptiste what kinda name is that?

by hip-hop artist Disiz La Peste (aka Sérigne M'Baye)

The world's oldest and most influential living body of civil law, Napoleon's Code Civil of 1804 enshrined equality before the law irrespective of creed or color-something the Land of the Free, oddly enough, would not achieve for another 150 years. The Code offered a grand bargain: join whatever team, tribe, or tradition you fancy: the Republic won't interfere. Just don't expect it to recognize any community besides itself. There was a sweet libertarian irony to this, insofar as to ignore, in this case, was to empower. Indeed, the Code Civil was instrumental in ending centuries of religious conflicts and spreading the emancipation of Jews across Europe. Today, the country known to the Vatican as the "eldest daughter of the Church" counts more Jews and Muslims than any nation in Europe. Which is not to say that much worshipping goes on in the land. Churches are little more than fancy alarm clocks for village neighborhoods. France is so secular, in fact, that 90 percent of all imams must be shipped in from abroad and 60 percent of them don't even speak French [12]. (But it's all right: they all sleep with an Arabic translation of the Code Civil under their pillow.)

France's idiosyncratic grandes écoles are a good example of egalitarianism gone mad. This unique (uniquely sadistic?) system of elite universities misses out on vast pools of talent because of its stifling rigidity. In its own demonic way, however, it is meritocracy incarnate, what with its anonymous, test-based admission criteria, free tuition, free stipend, free textbooks, etc. It proves that absolute fairness marinated in the right cocktail of obduracy and inflexibility can produce the ruling class' perfect engine of self-reproduction. The successful experiment currently underway at Sciences-Po to attract minorities points the way: American universities are the envy of the world and exhibit a degree of student diversity that French educators would be well advised to emulate.

Just don't tell them why US campuses are so gaga over diversity, for nothing will more offend the 17th-century peasant in them. Is it the moral imperative of equal opportunity for all? Not quite. Fairness is too serious a matter to be entrusted to college admissions officers-they have philosophy professors for that. The case for diversity rests chiefly on the marketing insight that broader cheese selections make for hipper restaurants. It's all about branding: Harvard as the Gucci of higher ed. And if it happens to be antisemitic, so be it: Ivy League schools capped the number of Jewish students until the 1960s. Universities always encrypt their mottoes so no one will understand them. Take the case of my beloved Princeton: "In the Nation's Service and in the Service of All Nations." That's Latin for "In the Service of Itself."

Branding and nepotism go hand in glove. To this day, the Ivies maintain a Rich-White-Guy affirmative action scam that allows a certified cretin like George W. Bush to serve a 4-year boozing stint and get a Yale degree for it. The French chopped off their king's head for that sort of favoritism and are unlikely to be impressed; especially when they see the kind of simian chest-thumper it winds up bringing to power. America is the world's only nation with a democratically elected royalty. An astonishing 63 percent of US presidents are mutual relatives (of easily traced lineage) and Dubya-man of the people-counts no fewer than 15 US presidents among his relatives [13]. Naturally, it is Hillary's and Jeb's self-perceived destiny to raise these numbers to ever more ludicrous heights.

* * *

There is the creed of the French Republic. And then there is the reality: riots that convulsed the nation for 3 weeks last fall. The roots of the crisis go back to the labor shortage of the sixties. Boatloads of North African immigrants landed on France's shores to provide the transient workforce needed to sustain an unprecedented economic boom. The transient part of the plan took a hit when the guests got the bizarre idea of having-gasp-children. Though of French nationality, this new generation, self-named Beurs (why Beurs? read on), grew up with the distinction of being neither truly French nor, for that matter, truly Arab. The Algerians among them bore the added stigma of a particularly nasty bout of decolonization.

The government parked the new immigrants in giant housing projects, called cités, apparently confident in the integrating virtues of reinforced cement concrete. To be fair, these were the same Le Corbusier-designed monstrosities that housed the poor in the wake of World War II. Fifty years on, priding itself on having inflicted the full brunt of architectural genius on two generations of urban guinea pigs, the government is finally calling in the bulldozers.

Strangers in their own land, young Beurs face an identity crisis that had spared earlier immigrants: France is their house but it won't be their home. Caught in the void between competing cultural narratives, they suffer social exclusion, employment discrimination, and a jobless rate that is twice the average. Social progress in France is often measured by the rhythms of civil protest. Aspiring children of the Republic, the Beurs have mastered the very French notion that taking to the streets is just politics by other means: always theatrical; sometimes destructive; rarely lethal. Last fall's unrest killed only 1 person, yet spread to 274 cities over 22 days [14]; a mere sideshow compared with the 1992 LA riots: 53 deaths; 1 city; 5 days [15].

Street protests in France are anti-authoritarian People vs. Cops dustups, not "multiculturalist" sports events like the race riots in Britain and Australia last year. The rioting Beurs took their cue from the farmers, truckers, and transit workers, for whom the street world is a stage. So secular, so Fight-The-Man, so French. The Union of French Islamic Organizations issued a fatwa against the riots, whose utter ineffectiveness only served to highlight the irrelevance of organized Islam in France. Hard as it may be on a neocon's digestive tract to swallow, religion played no role in the riots.