Meeting at the top (5/6): identity as a rampart

Alain Finkielkraut – The pathology of nationalism consists in saying that to be French, one must have French parents, grandparents, ancestors. It is an exclusively hereditary matter. We get out of this pathology when we say, with Levinas, that France is a nation to which we can attach ourselves by the heart and by the spirit as strongly as by the root. But today we go further: we criminalize heredity. It is forbidden to speak of “French stock”. Neither atavism, nor lineage, nor anchoring in a tradition now have the right of citizenship. There is a difficulty in making France heard in France which makes the assimilation of new populations almost impossible.

“France is a nation to which one can attach oneself by the heart and by the spirit as strongly as by the root”

Alain Finkielkraut

Mathieu Bock-Cote – The concept of French stock is authorized only in a negative way. He is only mentioned to curse him, as when François Hollande, speaking of a terrorist, had specified “that in addition he is a Frenchman of stock”, as if he were happy to dissociate terrorism from ‘Islamism.

Pierre Manent – I come back to Alain Finkielkraut’s argument: why wouldn’t we have the right to have the French conception of secularism prevail? Fine, but if other European countries and the United States point the finger at us when they share the same “universalism”, we are reduced to saying that after all, secularism is our custom. We have the right to impose our custom! This is a hopeless argument, since it is renouncing the universalism that we are also invoking. Our Franco-secular argument is neither convincing nor relevant, but this is the case with all the abstract arguments that we agitate today. There is no theoretical notion on the basis of which we could solve the problem “Islam and us”. What do we want? Guarantee a minimum of spiritual continuity and political independence of this nation called “France”. The only practicable approach would aim to unite a civic majority around a kind of minimum program: to preserve or regain a certain political independence, to preserve or to regain the capacity of the whole that we form to govern itself, to maintain a certain control of its relations with the world around it, which implies preserving certain characteristics of the French association, which may indeed include secularism and a certain relationship to Christianity. It is essential not to enlarge the Muslim part of France, not so much because it contradicts secularism but because it makes us politically dependent on countries which inspire legitimate mistrust and it makes it even more difficult to extending the European historical arc which has always included an active relationship with Christianity, and to which Islam has always been outside if not hostile.

Read also : Meeting at the top: France, what’s left of it?

Alain Finkielkraut – I would not say that secularism should be defended because it is our custom. Secularism is the French way of being modern, of practicing the separation of orders and as such it must be reaffirmed as clearly as possible. […]