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France
Country in Western Europe, and former colonial power, where blacks have had a presence for centuries.The French historian Henri Blet claims: “Frenchmen have never adopted racial doctrines affirming the superiority of whites over men of color.” It is true that the French Revolution, with its pioneering slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity, inaugurated a still vigorous French intellectual tradition of rationalism, tolerance for difference, and resistance to authority. It is also true that many twentieth-century black musicians, writers, and artists have experienced France as a haven of racial tolerance. Yet France, like other European powers, was an active participant in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and developed a colonial empire that systematically subordinated blacks to whites. France has also been a major contributor to European racist ideologies over the centuries, including late nineteenth-century “scientific” racism and the current views of the National Front. Moreover, while many more blacks live in France today than ever before, they are largely relegated to the least desirable positions in society.Blacks in the Ancien Régime
Although blacks have lived in and visited France since Roman times, we know little about the sporadic contacts that took place before the late seventeenth century. Apparently, a black woman from Sudan named Ismeria married Robert d'Eppes, a relative of the French king, and was enshrined as a black Madonna after her death in the mid-thirteenth century. Records also mention an Anselme d'Ysalguier from Toulouse, who lived in the African town of Gao (capital of the Songhai Empire) for eight years, and returned home in 1413 with a black wife and daughter. Traders brought a number of Africans to France in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as galley slaves to row warships. In 1571, however, when a ship owner attempted to sell some black slaves in Bordeaux, the city council ordered him to release them on the grounds that slavery did not exist in France.Until the eighteenth century, the only sources of information on Africans available to literate Frenchmen were prejudiced and fantastical. Islamic travelers depicted Africans in a starkly negative light. For example, the account of Leo Africanus, a Muslim traveler who had visited Tombouctou, Mali, declared, “The Negroes are brutes without reason. They live like animals, without rules or laws.” Leo's account was published in France in 1556. Other accounts, such as Pierre Bergeron's Voyages fameux de Vincent Le Blanc, published in 1648, drew on the ancient Greek and Roman traditions of spicy travelers' tales. According to Bergeron, the peoples of interior Africa are “so dirty that they eat the intestines of animals full with manure without washing them.”With the establishment of colonies on Guadaloupe and Martinique in 1635, and of the West India Company in 1670, France entered into plantation slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in earnest. From that time onward, French plantation owners, military commanders, and government officials frequently brought their slaves on trips to France as servants, status symbols, and curiosities. Slaves were also sent as gifts from African kings to French aristocrats and royalty. As French Sugar plantations began to generate wealth, slave-trading ports such as Nantes and Bordeaux became boomtowns.African princes, both genuine and sham, visited France. One of the most interesting impostors was Aniaba, who claimed to be heir to the throne of Assinie in Côte d'Ivoire. He came to Paris in 1687 and received a royal welcome: Louis XIV became his godfather and the famous orator Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet presided at his baptism in Notre Dame in 1692. However, when the chief of Assinie died in 1700 and a French warship sent Aniaba back to claim his homeland, the indifferent reception given him by the local people revealed him as a phony. Abram Hannibal, a true prince of Ethiopia, lived in Paris, where he studied military engineering and served in the French army from 1716 to 1723, before returning to his master, Peter the Great, in Russia.Until 1716, no rules covered the blacks present in France, apart from the widely held belief that slavery did not exist in the country (the so-called “Freedom Principle”). The Edict of October 1716 set conditions whereby slave owners could bring their slaves to France, register them, and retain them while they were on French soil. The two approved purposes for bringing slaves to France were to give them religious instruction or training in a trade such as carpentry; in practice, most slaves received neither. The Declaration of 1738 reiterated the provisions of the Edict and set a three-year limit on the amount of time a slave could remain in France; it also forbade slaves from marrying in France, with or without their masters' consent; and it prohibited slave owners from freeing their slaves in France except in their wills. The government's intention was to ensure that French slaves were put to work as much as possible in the colonies, where they were of most economic value.
French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, shown rallying his troops in Egypt before the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798, reinstated slavery in France in 1802.
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1789–1914: New Freedom and Opportunities
Although the French revolutionary movement proclaimed the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, in practice its leaders were unwilling to even discuss the abolition of slavery. Indeed, the economic prosperity of the French bourgeoisie (propertied middle class), the primary beneficiaries of the 1789 Revolution, stemmed partly from the wealth of colonial plantations and depended on the slave trade. Even the leading abolitionist movement, the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of Friends of the Blacks), promoted a gradual emancipation and compensation for slave owners. These factors made the French National Convention's decision in 1794 to abolish slavery in the French Empire all the more surprising.In fact, the emancipation of the slaves came in response to the outbreak of a massive slave rebellion in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti), France's most prized Caribbean colony, in 1791 (Haitian Revolution). The insurgents in Saint Domingue received arms from two forces opposed to revolutionary France—royalists who wanted to restore the French monarchy, and foreign powers, notably Britain and Spain, that hoped to take over Saint Domingue. In 1793 the two civil commissioners of Saint Domingue abolished slavery in the colony, with the belief that only this would end the rebellion. France learned of the abolition when the colony's three deputies, two of them black, arrived in Paris in January, 1794, and announced the decision. The Convention then had no choice but to abolish slavery in all French domains. Although much self-congratulatory rhetoric accompanied the passing of the decree, it was significant that the revolutionary leader Robespierre refrained from signing it.The thinkers of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, known as the philosophes, were famous for their articulation of liberal ideals such as democracy and political freedom. What is less well known is that these writers—men such as Montesquieu, Diderot, and Voltaire—were also instrumental in the development of modern European racism. To begin with, the philosophes' knowledge of, and interest in, Africa was seriously limited: out of the 3,867 books in Voltaire's library, only four were about Africa. Most relied on the travelers' tales of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for their knowledge of Africans. The philosophes then simply perpetuated preexisting stereotypes of Africans. Thus Voltaire said of blacks that their intelligence was “far inferior,” that “they are incapable of great attention,” and that they had only “a few more ideas than animals.” In the Encyclopédie, Diderot described the people of Côte d'Ivoire as debauched, without religion or belief in life after death.Until the eighteenth century, French scholars' view of blacks had been dominated by the long-standing equation between blackness and evil. The philosophes and their contemporaries sought to understand the differences between blacks and whites from a more “scientific” perspective. They attached great importance to environmental factors. Montesquieu believed that the heat made Africans lazy and immoral, and that they needed an authoritarian government in order for their societies to function. The leading French abolitionist of the late eighteenth century, Abbé Henri Grégoire, shared this view. The physical features of Africans attracted widespread speculation. The scientist Louis Daubenton asserted that Africans were born looking like Europeans. He believed the Africans' dark skin was a degenerative effect of the sun's heat, and their facial features a result of having had their noses squashed and lips pulled out by their parents. Constantin-François Volney argued that African facial features resulted from prolonged squinting at the sun. Such thinkers believed that all men were born equal, but that their experience of different environments resulted in a hierarchy, with Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom. According to this logic, Africans removed from their negative environment could revert to the superior status of Europeans.The philosophes demonstrated a marked ambivalence regarding the issue of slavery. Montesquieu declared that “Slavery is against nature,” and then added, “though in certain countries it is founded on natural reason.” He also recognized its economic value: “Sugar would be too expensive if the cane were not harvested by slaves.” Voltaire opposed slavery on political grounds, yet he believed that blacks were born to be slaves, and deserved to be. In his Essai sur les moeurs (An Essay on Universal History) he wrote: “As a result of a hierarchy of nations, Negroes are thus slaves of other men … a people that sells its own children is more condemnable than the buyer; this commerce demonstrates our superiority; he who gives himself a master was born to have one.”Gradually, during the course of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, French intellectual thought underwent a crucial shift in its perception of blacks. The view that blacks were essentially degraded Europeans gave way to the belief that the black race was biologically separate from, and innately inferior to, the white race, and that this inferiority was inherited over time. Georges Cuvier, in his work Tableau élémentaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux (Elementary Survey of the Natural History of Animals, 1798) declared in a crystallization of the racist thought of his time: “The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilized peoples of Europe belong and which appears to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage, and activity … a cruel law … seems to have condemned to an eternal inferiority the races of depressed and compressed skulls.”During the nineteenth century, French intellectuals, including those opposed to slavery, passionately adopted this biological determinism. Among its adherents were the positivist thinkers Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon. Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), a seminal work in the development of so-called scientific racism, warned of the collapse of European civilization owing to intermarriage with inferior races.The enormously influential phrenologists believed that head shape and brain size were the core determinants of human nature. A physician named Virey, in a book published in 1801, wrote “Among us [whites] the forehead is pushed forward, the mouth is pulled back as if we were destined to think rather than eat; the Negro has a shortened forehead and a mouth that is pushed forward as if he were made to eat instead of to think.” Also, in its entry on blacks, the Larousse dictionary of 1866 stated that their lesser intelligence resulted from a smaller brain size. Such views, and the alleged savagery and animalism of Africans, pervaded the works of popular French writers including Jules Verne, Honoré de Balzac, and Pierre Loti. By the 1880s the research methods of scientific racism had been discredited in France, and the accounts of French travelers to Africa were conveying a more realistic picture of blacks to French readers. The belief that blacks were innately inferior to whites, however, remained powerful in the minds of many French people.While white intellectuals remained mired in racist speculation, blacks made significant contributions to French society during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A number of blacks fought on the French side in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1792–1815. A group led by Julien Raimond, a free black man and pamphleteer from Saint Domingue, formed the “Black Legion” in 1792 to defend Paris against the attacking Prussian and Austrian forces. Joseph de Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was made the commander of the legion, and Thomas Alexandre Dumas (the father of writer Alexandre Dumas, Père, and the grandfather of writer Alexandre Dumas, Fils) was appointed the second in command. The legion saw little service against the enemy. Its main claim to notoriety, however, was its role as a firing squad for executing aristocrats in 1794 during the revolutionary Reign of Terror. After a general draft was introduced in 1793, additional blacks in France joined the army, fighting in black-only and mixed-race units. Joseph “Hercule” Damingue led a “Battalion of Black Pioneers,” distinguished himself in Napoleon Bonaparte's campaigns in Italy and Egypt (as did Alexandre Dumas), and was honored for his service.The 1794 emancipation had the desired effect in Saint Domingue. Toussaint Louverture's black army soon abandoned the Spanish cause and fought from then on for France. In 1802, however, Napoleon, firmly convinced of the inferiority of blacks, the evils of intermarriage, and the importance of maintaining the slave plantations, restored slavery and the Police des Noirs. The French jailed Toussaint Louverture, but his army successfully expelled the French from Saint-Domingue after a bitter struggle, and in 1804 the colony became independent as the Republic of Haiti. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, France was forced to agree to the abolition of the international slave trade, although French slaving ships continued to ply the coast of Africa through the 1820s with the tacit acceptance of the French government. French slavery itself continued until 1848. The restoration of slavery seems to have had little harmful effect on blacks in France; there is no evidence that former slaves were returned to their owners. In fact, the regulations, by prohibiting the transport to France of slaves, yet permitting free blacks to enter the country, actually encouraged slave owners to free their slaves before taking them as servants to France.During the 1820s and 1830s a group of colonial mulatto activists living in Paris in exile, including Adzée Louisy, the poet Louis T. Houat, and Mondésir Richard, wrote a series of pamphlets opposing slavery and highlighting racial mistreatment in the colonies. The most prominent pamphleteer was Cyril Charles Auguste Bissette, who in 1834 founded the Revue des colonies (the first literary journal in France devoted to black culture) and was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1851. The 1848 emancipation completed a gradual process in which black pamphleteers, such as Bissette, and white abolitionists, such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Victor Schoelcher, had campaigned steadily against slavery, plantation owners had freed many of their slaves, and France had come to derive much of its sugar from domestically grown sugar beet rather than slave-grown sugar cane. Under the terms of the 1848 act, all slaves received French citizenship, the right to vote (men only), and equal treatment under the law. The 1848 Revolution established a 750-member National Assembly with deputies from France and all the French colonies. Several blacks, including Bissette and François-Auguste Perrinon, were elected to represent the Caribbean colonies.Blacks began to travel to France for their education in the early nineteenth century, and many stayed to pursue literary or artistic careers, inspired by the stunning successes of Alexandre Dumas, Père and his son Alexandre Dumas, Fils. Beginning in 1795 the French government granted scholarships to the sons of colonial black leaders for study in France. Many blacks came independently, however. Guillaume Guillon was sent by his father, a baron in Guadeloupe, to study painting in Paris. He had a successful career, eventually becoming a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts (College of Fine Arts); his painting Mort de Virginie was later hung in the Louvre. Auguste Lacaussade from Réunion was sent to Nantes in 1827 for his education and developed a successful career as a French poet, winning prizes from the Académie Franàaise for his work. From the 1830s onward a steady stream of black and mixed-race intellectuals from New Orleans, Louisiana, including Victor Séjour, Pierre Dalcour, and Louis and Camille Thierry, came to France to study, and a number of them remained to pursue literary careers.Prompted by Africa's fabled riches, the urge to compete with other European powers in the “Scramble for Africa,” and notions of French cultural supremacy, France launched a massive acquisition of territory in Africa in the late nineteenth century. In 1822 a French geographer wrote: “We want … Africa, with the rest of the world, to pay its tribute to our industry, to send to our cities overfilled with men its treasures, products, precious metals … Africa must in its turn fall to modern civilization.” France's leading intellectuals rallied to the imperialist cause, including the writer Victor Hugo, who declared in 1849: “France is composing a magnificent poem that has as its title: the colonization of Africa … she bears in her hand light and liberty; she knows that, for a savage people, to be occupied by France is to begin to be free; for a city of barbarians, to be burned by France is to begin to be enlightened.” Some blacks even fought on the French side during the African conquests: Alfred Amédée Dodds, who was one of the few black French generals in the nineteenth century, led France's conquest of Dahomey in 1893.Blacks continued to come to France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As they had previousy, most worked as servants, although artists and intellectuals also settled in France or stayed for extended periods. Notable black residents in France during this period were Julien Girard, a scholar of Latin and Greek from Guadeloupe who later became a professor of philosophy at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand; the African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, who settled in Paris; and the African American sculptor Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller. A number of prominent African Americans visited France at this time, and as honored visitors were well treated by the French—a fact that proved crucial for the later development, among African Americans, of the myth of a “colorblind” France. Prominent visitors included Ira Aldridge in 1867; Frederick Douglass in 1886; Mary Eliza Church Fuller, who visited repeatedly between 1888 and 1921; Booker Tagliaferro Washington in 1899; James Weldon Johnson in 1905; the Reverend Henry Hugh Proctor, who toured the French battlefields in 1919; and W. E. B. Du Bois, who fell in love with France during visits in 1894, 1906, and in 1918, when he was sent by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to investigate anti-black prejudice in the American forces in France during World War I.World War I until the 1960s: A Golden Age for Blacks in France
World War I (1914–1918) marked a turning point in the black experience of France and, similarly, in France's perceptions of blacks. According to some estimates, 40 percent of the French soldiers in the Crimean War (1853–1856) were black, and many blacks fought for France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). It was in World War I, however, that blacks distinguished themselves as the “saviors of France.” African soldiers in the French army, whose numbers totaled 135,000 by the end of 1918, fought in most of the major battles of the war. Around 200,000 African American soldiers fought in France on the Allied side. The black troops, especially the so-called tirailleurs sénégalais (the Senegalese riflemen), were widely praised for their valor. Most important, at least for the African Americans, was the contrast between the discrimination, segregation, and Lynching in the United States at the time, and the welcoming attitude of the French. Officials and the general public were grateful for blacks' assistance in the war effort, and villagers voiced few complaints against blacks being billeted in their houses. One African American soldier wrote to his mother “These French people don't bother with no color line business. They treat us so good that the only time I ever know I'm colored is when I look in the glass.” Many French reacted with surprise and indignation to the racist behavior of white Americans toward African Americans. The French government ordered the burning of an American document instructing the French that fraternizing with blacks was an affront to American national policy. Not surprisingly, many African Americans chose to remain in France after the end of the war. Those who returned gave their fellow blacks compelling, yet flawed images of a racially harmonious society.The African American GIs were the first to introduce France to Jazz. The 369th Regiment included a sizable jazz band led by James Reese Europe, and during 1918 Europe's band played all over France to enthusiastic audiences, including French head of state Raymond Poincaré. With the renewal of nightlife in Paris after the end of the war, jazz clubs such as Zelli's, Chez Florence, and Le Grand Duc sprang up, and African American entertainers such as Louis Mitchell, Sidney Joseph Bechet, Eugene Bullard, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, and the legendary Josephine Baker, visited or settled in the city. Jazz became the most popular musical form in Parisian nightclubs and dance halls, and with the growing ownership of radios in the 1920s, it soon found its way into French homes.The presence of African American entertainers in Paris had an important effect on French intellectuals. Blackness was highly fashionable at the time; many artists and writers saw Western culture as exhausted and decadent, and admired the spontaneity and (for them) the exoticism of African art and African American music. Picasso and the Cubists, Matisse, Derain and other Paris-based painters drew on African forms and colors in their work, and classical composers, such as Maurice Ravel, incorporated jazz elements into their music. Beginning in 1925, Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre, gave many French people their introduction to the beauty of the black body dancing. An illustration of the French fascination with African Americans is provided by the white French drummer Alain Romans, who recalled that at that time it was difficult to get a job as a white musician. As the only white member of a black band, Romans actually played a number of gigs in blackface, including one occasion where a little girl screamed after touching his face and getting black paint on her fingers. As historian Tyler Stovall has remarked, “whereas in America blackface enabled theaters to present the black aesthetic without blacks, freezing them out of the white entertainment world, in Paris a white musician's use of blackface reflected the dominant position of blacks as jazz performers.”Although the Great Depression of the 1930s dimmed the vitality of Parisian nightlife and, correspondingly, the opportunities for jazz entertainers, by then jazz had carved out a permanent position in Parisian clubs. It had also gained a respect among French intellectuals, signaled by the publication in 1934 of Hugues Panassié's Le Jazz Hot, the first significant study of jazz written in France. Jazz performers, such as William T(haddeus) (“Bill”) Coleman, came to Paris for extended stays. Others, such as Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, paid shorter visits. The 1930s also saw the success of Bal Nègre, a nightclub in the Montparnasse district that specialized in the béguine, a Caribbean dance form, and catered to a French West Indian clientele.Still, racist perceptions frequently arose from underneath the French fascination with black entertainers. The eminent playwright Robert de Flers condemned the Revue Nègre, saying that the show “makes us revert to the ape in less time than it took us to descend from it.” The novels of Paul Morand, such as Magie Noire and Baton Rouge, draw a parallel between black dancers, such as Josephine Baker, and primitive savagery. Morand wrote about Baker, “This young witch pulverized the musical, sentimental, and political melodies of the whites, forcing them to return to the beginnings of the world, to the simplicity of the jungle … she imposed on them the old African totemic dances.”After World War II, during which the Nazi occupiers of Paris banned jazz, African American jazz musicians, many of them among the quarter of a million African Americans who fought in the liberation of France in 1944, initiated a rapid revival of jazz in France, symbolized by Dizzy Gillespie's 1948 concert in Paris and the International Paris Jazz Festival the following year. During the 1950s the jazz drummer Kenny Clarke settled in France, and Miles Davis spent extended periods of time there. Since then, jazz has retained a prominent place in French culture.Many prominent African American writers lived in France between the world wars, including Claude McKay, who spent part of the summer of 1923 posing nude as an artist's model on the Left Bank in Paris; Countee Cullen, who declared that “Paris is where I would love to build my castles in Spain”; Langston Hughes; Walter Francis White; Jean Toomer; Gwendolyn Bennett; and Anna Julia HaywardCooper, the first African American to receive a doctorate from the Sorbonne. During the 1930s Paris became the center of the literary movement known as Négritude. With institutions such as the publication Revue du monde noir and social gatherings hosted by the Nardal sisters, the movement brought McKay and other African American writers together with leading French-speaking African and Caribbean writers, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, in a joint effort to define the meaning of blackness. At the same time, some French white intellectuals were propagating new, less stereotyped, views of Africa. For example, in his book The Negroes, Maurice Delafosse pointed out the similarities between the medieval kingdoms of West Africa and those of Europe.After the hiatus of World War II, the African American and French-speaking African and Caribbean literary communities reestablished themselves in Paris. In the eyes of French intellectuals, African Americans were no longer symbols of an exotic African primitivism: they were viewed instead as bearers, and critics, of a powerful American popular culture that both attracted and threatened the French. During the 1950s three prominent African American writers—Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes—settled in France. The French-language African literary journal Présence africaine was started in 1947 by a group of writers under the guidance of Alioune Diop of Senegal. René Maran, a native of Martinique who won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1921 for his novel Batouala, is perhaps the best-known French black writer of the twentieth century. In 1950, a prize known as the Grand Prix de la Mer et de l'Outre-Mer (Grand Prize of the Sea and Overseas) was established in order to reward literary effort on the part of black writers in France and in the French colonies. Among black residents of France who have won the award are Joseph Sobel and Clément Richer. In 1956 Richard Wright, along with Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and the black French poet David Diop, organized the Congress of Negro Artists and Writers—the first official gathering of African American and French-speaking black intellectuals.Black participation in French politics increased after World War I, and from that time until the late 1950s many French cabinets, in recognition of the importance of the colonies, included a black member. Prominent examples are Félix Houphouët from Côte d'Ivoire, Léopold Senghor, who edited the text of the French Constitution of 1946, and statesman Blaise Diagne, both from Senegal. Illustrative of France's success in gaining the acquiescence of black leaders in colonialism, Diagne, in his opening speech to the Pan-African Congress of 1919 (organized by W. E. B. Du Bois) praised the civilizing mission of French imperial rule. Although the black Frenchman Gratien Candace was elected in 1938 to the position of vice president of the chamber, the number of black representatives in the French legislature increased dramatically only during the Fourth Republic (1946–1958). During this period, the president of the senate was a black man—Gaston Monnerville from Martinique—and more than fifty blacks sat as deputies or senators, but this figure declined significantly after 1958 as the African colonies opted for independence. In 1949, the black Félix Éboué, from French Guiana, who in 1940 as governor of Chad had defied the Nazi-affiliated Vichy government and sided with Charles de Gaulle's Free French, was buried in the Panthéon in Paris, the highest honor available to a French citizen.The few blacks in France during the 1920s and 1930s rarely met with openly expressed racial discrimination, and interracial love affairs, such as that between the black pianist Henry Crowder and the English heiress Nancy Cunard, were well tolerated. The greatest problems, in fact, came from white American visitors, such as the woman who stormed out of her Paris hotel after learning that a black woman was staying there, shouting at the owner “I could never think of using the same bath as her,” to which he responded, “What do you fear, madame, that the colored lady will stain the tub?” Some French establishments collaborated with the white American position, especially those with a large American clientele. For example, the Coupole café refused to admit Claude McKay because of his skin color.African Americans in Paris recreated an African American community in a more tolerant environment than that of the United States. Louis Mitchell and Margaret Brown, both African American, operated American restaurants in Montmartre, and African Americans also owned two clothing boutiques in the district. Although Leroy Haynes opened a soul food restaurant in Montmartre in 1949, most African Americans after World War II congregated in the Latin Quarter and in Montparnasse.The 1960s to the Present: The Glitter Wears Thin
The growing number of black and other immigrants since the 1960s has fundamentally altered the relationship of blacks to French society. Before that period blacks constituted a tiny minority of musicians, writers, and artists outside the mainstream of French society, and most French perceived them as exotic and unthreatening visitors. While many French may have thought them inferior, due to the racist intellectual legacy outlined above, in person they could treat blacks with esteem and affection and show an interest in and respect for their culture. Moreover, most blacks in France before the 1960s were willing to adapt to French culture, whether out of a desire to assimilate into an apparently tolerant society (in the case of African Americans) or due to their French cultural heritage (in the case of blacks from the long-established colonies of the French Caribbean).A 1961 estimate placed the number of blacks living in France between 30,000 and 40,000. As early as the 1960s, opinion polls were revealing antiblack prejudice. A survey conducted by the Ministry of Cooperation in 1962 revealed that over half the respondents believed in the superiority of whites over blacks, and another poll of the same year showed that one out of every five people believed that there were too many blacks in France.It is true that since the 1960s the greatest targets of racial animosity in France have been North Africans and people of North African descent. French bigots may have focused on North Africans due to their large numbers (around five million, or nearly a tenth of the population); their adherence to Islam, which precludes an easy integration into French society; and the legacies of the brutal war in Algeria. In 1961, the African American writer William Gardner Smith recorded a massacre in the center of Paris in which the French police shot or beat to death more than 200 Algerians taking part in a demonstration. However, racial attacks have also targeted blacks. Wilmot Alfred Fraser, a black American visiting Paris in the 1960s, described French racism as “but an attenuated form of what I have known in the USA.” Since the 1960s the increase in openly expressed racism in France has contrasted with the greater freedoms brought about by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.By 1980, more than 200,000 blacks resided in France, most of them unskilled workers living in slum conditions and competing directly with whites for employment and housing. In 1972, a bill outlawing racial discrimination passed in the French legislature. In previous years, its passage had been blocked by deputies arguing that such a bill was not necessary since racism did not exist in France.In the 1980s, French racism became a militant political force in the form of the extreme-right National Front party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, which showed a hatred for people of color reminiscent of nineteenth-century racist thinkers. In 1984, in response to the rise of the National Front, young Arabs, blacks, and Jews founded SOS-Racisme, an anti-racist movement spanning racial and ethnic boundaries. Led by Harlem Désir, a French West Indian, the movement organized mass demonstrations, protested racial discrimination and police harassment, and distributed thousands of badges bearing the slogan Touche pas à mon pote (Leave my buddy alone).The National Front and its supporters blame so-called immigrants for France's economic woes—in particular, unemployment—and call for the end of legal immigration and the forcible expulsion of all foreigners from the country. (French racists often use the term immigrants broadly to refer to “people of color.” This usage ignores the fact that many were born and raised in France.) Many political leaders have adopted aspects of the National Front's language. In a 1992 interview with the New York Times, French President Jacques Chirac lamented the situation of French workers living next to so-called immigrants “with a father, three or four wives, about twenty kids, earning $10,000 a month without working … If you add to that the noise and the smell, the French worker goes crazy.” Indeed, the National Front has carefully harnessed the frustrations and resentments of the French working class and channeled them into racial animosity toward so-called immigrants, who become the scapegoats for the country's economic and social troubles.By 1998, there were more than 350,000 blacks from West Africa living in France, and more than 400,000 French-speaking West Indians living in the Paris metropolitan area alone. The influx of blacks has led to a thriving African and Caribbean cultural life in large cities such as Paris, which boasts black radio stations (Tropique FM and Afrique FM), restaurants (Le Kaissa and La Savane), discotheques (Ruby's and Rex), publications (Jeune Afrique), districts (Barbès-Rochechouart), and rap groups such as Rootsneg, which give impoverished blacks a means of expressing their anger in a nonviolent fashion.In 2002 Chirac won reelection over challenger Le Pen by the widest margin of victory which a French presidential election has ever afforded. Two recent changes in French statehood—the phasing out of the franc for the Euro, and the abandonment of military conscription for a volunteer army—indicate that modern France is far more willing to cooperate with its European neighbors than it had previously been.Conclusion
The experiences of blacks in France have included those of the downtrodden servants and slaves of the pre-emancipation era, the jazz stars of the years between the world wars, the intellectual elite of the mid-twentieth century, and the Afro-French working class of more recent years. Although informed by a legacy of racist thinking, many French have approached blacks with curiosity and benevolence so long as the blacks concerned are intellectuals or artists, small in number, outside the mainstream of French society, and unthreatening to the French way of life. As a more substantial black population has developed in France since 1960, the polished veneer of tolerance has often worn off to reveal fear and resentment underneath. Yet something important has remained. In the 1989 Bastille Day parade celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution, officials chose African American singer Jessye Norman to perform the French national anthem “La Marseillaise.” French scholar Michel Fabre noted “the will of the French government to make a national commemoration into an international celebration via a member of the ‘colored’ majority of the world, to give the principles ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ [freedom, equality, brotherhood] their fullest meaning.” This was more than mere propaganda, for the ideals of the Revolution have survived in France to provide a crucial counterbalance to racist undercurrents during the late twentieth century.See also Colonial Rule; Dance in Latin America and the Caribbean; Francophone Writing; World War I and African Americans; World War II and African Americans.Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center
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