By Najete Michell and Paul Taylor
This article deals with the main anti-racist struggles in France after WWII. The most predominant racism in France since WWII accompanied and followed the Algerian War of Independence, 1954-1961; to be more accurate, we should say a deep hatred towards Algerians and by extension towards all Arabs.
The main actors in France in the fight against racism are the descendants of ex-colonised people who, unlike their parents, are French citizens. They are the living evidence of the link between colonialism and racism. After four or five generations, they are still referred to as children of migrants. For these subsequent generations, it is important to recall the struggles of their parents, who, unlike the current predominant view, were not submissive.
At the end of WWII, France needed a cheap labour force to rebuild the country. It called on its North African colonies in the 1950s. Workers from the French colonies worked in the building industry to replace the 500,000 houses destroyed in the war. They also worked in the steel and car industries. The car companies built huge factories with black (2) workers making up about three-quarters of the workforce on the assembly lines. This was a critical contribution to the post-war economic boom of the ‘Thirty Glorious Years.’
While immigrants were building council houses for the French state, they were themselves living either in migrant hostels or slums, like the famous Nanterre shanty town of mainly Algerians. Capital was exploiting them as much as possible, but completely disregarded the reproduction needs of this labour force, such as decent accommodation.
Sonacotra rent strike
The first major migrant struggle was in 1975 with the rent strike of the Sonacotra hostels. Those types of hostels still exist, and the residents continue to be confronted with disrespect and infantilisation.
The Sonacotra hostels were built in 1956 during the Algerian war with the explicit aim to prevent the FLN from raising dues in the slums. There were 275 Sonacotra hostels in France, accommodating 73,000 male workers, mainly Algerians, but already other nationalities were present from the Sub-Saharan French ex-colonies. Each hostel had its own manager, generally a retired soldier from the Algerian war. Not only were the living conditions awful, with little space, but there was also a humiliating disciplinary regime.
The Sonacotra rent strike to this day remains one of the biggest and longest in the world. The strike was 25,000 strong. It went on for more than five years. It was completely self-organised. The initiators of the strike copied the collective form of organisation of the FLN (The Algerian National Liberation Front). After the strike, they got rid of the racist managers and had the right to organise themselves in the daily life of the hostels. It was a model of organisation and democracy with solidarity between the residents. The strike showed that the first generation of migrants was fighting back. Many lessons still deserve to be learnt from it.
Racism in the workplace
In 1981, Mitterand was elected president, and a whole new cycle of black struggles began. The wave of workers’ struggles that had been unleashed by May ‘68 had petered out. 1982 saw a sudden eruption in the Talbot Citroën plants, which had not known any strikes for three decades. There had been many strikes in Renault, but in Citroën the grip of the management on its workforce was particularly strong: it combined paternalism with repression. Each newly hired worker had to join an employees’ association, run by the bosses that the latter call a ‘union’. Migrant workers who were the majority in the car industry, mostly Moroccans, put forward basic demands, including the right to unionise, under the banner of the CGT.
In 1983, the strike started again, this time because of massive redundancies. It was self-organised with an Arab leadership, as the CGT could only help from the outside. The fight became tougher when a section of white workers, prompted by the management, acted as scabs. They attacked the strikers, throwing bolts and racist insults at them. In their final assault, they were joined by fascist thugs.
The management received some unexpected support from the Mitterand socialist government in the form of racism. The Union of the Left elected in 1981 had started the turn to la Rigueur, or austerity. Some ministers said the Talbot Citroën strike was the product of ‘the foreign hand’, ie Iran. The evidence for this so-called Islamist fundamentalism was one single demand, which had been a minor one in the workers’ previous platform, that of having rooms for prayers. In Renault, they already had rooms for prayers, without issue whatsoever. We can date the emergence of the wave of Islamophobia that characterises France today to the Talbot Citroën strike.
Black (2) youth rebellion
The end of 1983 saw the decisive founding struggle of anti-racism in France: the march for Equality and Against Racism. The slums had been demolished and replaced by huge council tower blocks in the suburbs, far away from public services, shops, and transport facilities. The second generation youth of migrants were racially discriminated at all levels, especially in education and job opportunities. Essentially, they were still considered migrants – unfortunately, this remains the case today – and not as French citizens, who should have the same rights as anybody born on French soil. To top it off, they were constantly harassed by the police, who had also recruited ex-soldiers from Algeria. These racist incidents would quickly spark rebellion in the form of riots.
The trigger for the March for Equality in 1983 was the number of black youth who had been regularly murdered by the police or racists. For example, in 1973 in Marseille, after Algeria nationalised its oil, about fifty Algerian men were killed in two months in what was called the ’murderous summer’.
In 1983, the youth moved from rioting to politics. They realised it was more effective. The change started in the Lyon’s les Minguettes housing estates, with a hunger strike against police harassment. Subsequently, the black youth decided to create an organisation called SOS Minguettes. This was a surprise to everybody, including the police and the government, who used to consider the youth as ‘delinquents’, not as activists. But it was also potentially a political threat to the state and racist policies. The leader of this organisation, Toumi Djaïdja, was shot by a policeman, but he survived after being in a coma. Whilst recovering in his hospital bed, he and his friends planned a peaceful march. They started to walk from Marseille to Paris on the 15th of October. Each time they reached towns where other murders had been committed, meetings were organised, and new youth organisations were created. The level of consciousness was rising. It was no longer just a local issue but had become a national one. Support for the march rapidly gained momentum. Their target had been a 100,000 strong final demonstration on their arrival in Paris on the 3rd of December. In the event they were twice that size. A delegation met Mitterand at the Elysée Palace. However, the SOS Minguettes’ demands for equality for black youth were not met. Instead, the government only announced a ten-year residence and work permit for undocumented migrants.
The fakery of SOS Racism
The positive outcome of the 1983 march was that in les quartiers populaires the youth had started to organise and get political. There were several other marches in the following years, but the national coordination lost its momentum when SOS Racism was created in 1984 by the Socialist Party. Subsequently, SOS became hegemonic, while the self-organised youth in the suburbs were marginalised. The press presented SOS as the heirs of the 1983 March for Equality. It was not true, but SOS never denied it.
SOS Racism was supported by the socialist government, with whom they organised huge concerts. The biggest, in 1985, was in la Place de la Concorde, attracting several hundred thousand. If anti-racism was promoted by SOS, it was as a moral individual issue: a ‘love each other’ approach advocating diversity. Equality of rights, entrenched discrimination and segregation in les quartiers were ignored, and above all, the right to live. The Socialist Party opposed challenging the police and their misdeeds.
The hegemony of SOS Racism in the mass media over the national anti-racist struggle disempowered the autonomous self-organised movement. The latter lost its national unity and split into a variety of smaller, weakened groups. Some carried on their activism within the still marginalised and neglected quartiers populaires, which endured less equipped schools, significant levels of academic failure, less public transport, services and other amenities like shops and banks. To this day, black youth are particularly targeted with high rates of unemployment and continuous police harassment because of their colour: their names sounding ‘foreign’, or their address.
The real heirs of the 1983 March Against Racism
The French police’s brutal racism is endemic and systemic, resulting in many deaths of black people in police custody, during arrest or on the street. Families and friends of victims created many local “Truth and Justice” committees.
The MIB (Mouvement Immigration Banlieue), created in the 1990s, emerged from the 1983 March Against Racism. One of their activities remains the support of families who have had one of their members killed by the police. They share their experiences of how to organise and deal with the justice system.
Another significant group appeared in 2005: the Indigenes of the Republic. They call themselves this because, as children of colonised peoples, despite being French citizens, they are still treated with the same colonial methods. Although a very small group, it has had a big impact on antiracism. It is a national current, with a well-known leader, Houria Bouteldja, who has been demonised for years by the media and politicians. In 2020, Bouteldja and others left the Indigenes and created Paroles d’Honneur PDH, which organises debates on current issues online and in person several times a week. It is very educative on racism and anti-colonialism with 100,000 subscribers.
All these groups stemming from the 1983 March belong to the decolonial movement. Unlike SOS Racism’s focus on morality, they consider racism asapolitical issuestemming from slavery and colonisation. It is systemic, i.e. part of the system, it is ingrained in institutions and society. It requires, first of all, self-organisation, combined with alliances with the labour movement.
The never-ending harassment of black youth has led to further national rebellions. In October 2005, two children, Zyed, 17 and Bouna, 15, were chased by the police and died as they hid in an electricity substation. Immediately, there were riots all over France for three weeks. A state of emergency was declared with a curfew, using a 1955 law used in France against Algerians during the Algerian War. The silence from the left parties and organisations was shocking.
In the years following, whilst repression was increasing against the black masses, different anti-racist struggles spread as self-organised groups started to fight back on their specific racist oppression: for example, on Islamophobia, anti-Roma; the Brigade anti-négrophobie BAN and the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires CRAN.
It was in this context that Adama Traoré was killed in July 2016. A powerful national campaign was launched by his sister Assa Traoré and the Adama Committee. They organised huge demonstrations, particularly bringing together thousands of black youth from the suburbs, but also families and campaigns by other victims of the police. The left this time started to become involved, particularly la France Insoumise. Gradually, awareness grew that justice was never served in the case of police violence and murders. This awareness was further raised when the Gilets Jaunes were themselves victims of police repression. The same scenario was repeated two years ago with the assassination of Nahel, a seventeen-year-old youth. This time, the murder by the police had been filmed. There were riots all over France that were met with extreme repression against the black youth.
State-led Islamophobia
Islamophobia in France should rather be called the long persecution of Muslims by the French State. Anti-Muslim racism was ingrained in the country as a consequence of French rule in Algeria. France has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and the oppression of Muslims is greater than in any other country. There are many examples, like the Talbot strike, showing how the French state has habitually whipped up Islamophobia. A major escalation took place with the debate on the hijab at school in 1989, which has continued for years. Only one thousand young adolescents in France had been wearing a scarf at school at the time when it started, but the government still passed a law banning it in 2004. The vast majority of the left adopted very bad positions. The whole debate, amplified by the media, was centred on secularism with a completely false and abusive interpretation of laïcité (The Law of separation of State and Churches in 1905). This first ban in schools was supposed to settle the issue. The contrary happened: racists were encouraged to call for extending the ban everywhere, including hostels, sports rooms and workplaces. Muslim women were insulted or physically attacked in the streets. This first Islamophobic victory opened the way to new prohibitive legislation, including the banning of the burqâ in the streets and a decree against mothers wearing the hijab during school trips. The main targets are always women. The CCIF (Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France) successfully waged a number of legal battles against abuses of individuals.
After the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, several thousand Muslims had their houses violently raided, but there were only four prosecutions. Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the persecution of Muslims continued afterwards.
At last, on the 10th of November 2019 the Muslim community rose up with a 40,000 strong demonstration. This was a turning point: sections of the left finally woke up, and joined the protest, particularly la France Insoumise, which had become hegemonic on the left. A year later, Macron intensified his attacks on the Muslim community; many organisations were banned, including the CCIF, which had thousands of members, after being accused of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood. Once again, new Islamophobic legislation followed: the 2021 Law on Separatism portrayed Muslims as potential terrorists and put them on a police watchlist.
The Sans Papiers, undocumented migrants
The last significant and heroic struggles we will mention are those of undocumented workers. After the economic crisis in 1973, state policy on immigration worsened by making migrants from the ex-colonies undocumented and thereby illegal, thus rendering their lives unbearable. In 1996, the struggle of Saint Bernard, named after the occupation of the Saint Bernard church, became famous after the police broke down its doors with axes, and used tear gas while whole families with babies and hunger strikers were inside. Suddenly, the French population was discovering a whole part of the population which had been made invisible: undocumented immigrants. The Saint Bernard struggle had huge support from celebrities, artists, politicians, trade unionists and others. This historic struggle is the starting point of the Mouvement des Sans Papiers, which began to self-organise. In 2008, their field of battle became the workplace. Capital needs migrant labour, but at a minimum price. To achieve that goal, it is helped by the state that produces legislation making undocumented workers illegal, creating the opportunity for many abuses, such as sometimes non-payment of wages or dismissal without warning. The unions started to organise occupations in 2008 to win rights for undocumented workers, but the CGT did not respect their self-organisation, so the Sans Papiers occupied for months a part of the Paris CGT headquarters. Since that time, strikes and occupations of Sans Papiers have been happening regularly. The most recent, the Chronopost picket, lasted three years. They demand “papers!’ i.e. work and residence permits.
Recently, minors have joined the struggle. They have been living on the streets, harassed by the police. They demand the right to go to school and to housing. Undocumented workers and minors have recently formed in the Paris region a unified committee, composed of eight groups, called l’Intercollectif des Sans Papiers. (picture). Self-organisation is key for them. They want to speak in their own name and control their own struggles. But they need the solidarity of the entire labour movement and the left because of their extremely precarious situation, their lack of knowledge of the French institutions, and of the language for many.
Lessons
When the general level of class struggle across society declines, black people often lead the fightback. In that regard, they play a sort of vanguard role in the class struggle, changing the general dynamic of resistance. Undocumented workers only have their chains to lose, especially when they have risked their lives in the Mediterranean Sea to come to France, where they are met with racism, inequality of rights, and persecution.
We also see that in poorly unionised firms with abusive management, black workers often lead the fight, objectively showing the way forward, for the benefit of all workers, including those workers who reject them or even worse turn against them because of racism. Self-organisation of those directly affected by racism is key to fighting racism effectively. It requires the respect of autonomous movements and acceptance of their black leadership. But it also needs the support and involvement of the organised labour movement.
Unfortunately, such alliances have, in the past, not only been lacking in France, but worse than that, left organisations have adopted reactionary positions on racism. We already mentioned the decisive negative role the Socialist Party played in stirring Islamophobia in the Talbot strike, and later with the banning of hijab at school. In 1989, the then socialist prime minister, Michel Rocard declared at the National Assembly: “We cannot welcome all the misery in the world.”
Mitterand boosted the far right
More fundamentally, President Mitterand bears a decisive responsibility in the growth of the National Front and the legitimisation of racism in public spaces. He gave the green light to have Jean Marie Le Pen on television, to try to divide the bourgeois camp, for electoral reasons. For the first time, in February 1984, Le Pen benefited from a platform to spread his nauseating ideas in the main debating programme of French TV, ‘L’heure de Vérité’. The audience ratings were massive. The result was immediate: the next day hundreds queued at the National Front NF headquarters to join it. Up until then, the NF founded in 1972 upon the resentment from the defeats of the war against the Nazis and of the Algerian war, had not grown much. In 1981, Le Pen could not get the necessary 500 signatures of mayors in order to participate in the presidential elections and in the following legislative elections the NF got 0.18% of the votes. But ‘L’heure de Vérité’ boosted them, and several months later, in the June 1984 European elections, they reached 11%.
Racism, imperialism and capitalism
Beyond its conjunctural promotions by governments, racism is structurally embedded in France. History tells us how capitalism was built on the primitive accumulation of capital from slavery. Racism is therefore at the root of capitalism and was extensively used and perpetuated by colonisation. The recent anti-imperialist seizures of power in West Africa and the building of the Alliance des Etats du Sahel (AES) have exposed to the world the neocolonialist Françafrique system imposed on its ex-colonies since their so-called independence. French state racism stems from there, with all its inhumane and racist laws on immigration, the way migrants are treated, and the Islamophobic obsession with the hijab or the abaya. All of these racist discriminations and laws are rooted in colonialism. During the Algerian war, Muslim women were subjected to public ‘unveiling ceremonies’ organised by French white women. Racism and colonial mentality are still very prevalent in France, but how could it be otherwise when France still has a dozen colonies in the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean? It is also worth noting that the last human zoo took place in France as recently as 1994, near the town of Nantes.
Political anti-racism is therefore a threat to the capitalist system. It questions very deeply not only the system of exploitation and oppression on which our society is built, but also the State, which ensures and enforces oppression. This is the reality that the families and friends of those who have been murdered are confronted by. In their quest for justice for their loved ones, an indispensable step for their grieving, they face not only the total impunity of the police but the complicity of the judicial system that supports the police institution.
The constant targeting and harassment of the youth in les quartiers populaires leads to a deep questioning of society. The rebellions it creates are potential dangers to the social order and those who have an interest in maintaining it. They worry that the dynamic of the rebellions of the black youth could become uncontrollable.
Notes:
- France was defeated in Algeria, with little solidarity from the French population for the Algerian people. This indifference to the Algerian revolution was due to censorship, propaganda and disinformation. Algeria was never depicted as a colony. Therefore, the war of independence was not described as a colonial war but instead was called “the events” in a so-called “French” département. Moreover, the traditional left parties, including the Communist Party failed to support Algerian independence until a few months before independence. The SFIO (the ancestor of the SP) launched the repression in Algeria, i.e.Guy Mollet, then prime minister, gave “les pleins pouvoirs” (total power) to the French army. Solidarity came from a part of the Trotskyists who helped materially with money and weapons the FLN, intellectuals shocked by the use of torture, and opposition to the war by thousands of conscripts who refused to go to Algeria. There were racist physical attacks against Algerians on the streets of France, called ‘les Ratonnades.’ This offensive culminated in its most terrible outcome on the 17th of October 1961 in Paris, even though the victory of the movement for Algerian independence was ensured. A peaceful demonstration of Algerians was horribly repressed by the French National Police: people were beaten up, thrown into the Seine. It is reckoned that about three hundred died.
- Theword “black” is here used in the political sense, as a translation of “les racisé.e.s” which basically means non-whites experiencing racism, i.e. a whole system of power and discrimination imposed on those considered as “blacks” through the process of racialization. The concept of racialisation also applies to the term “white”.