French Dis NATIONALISTS PUT UP A RACIST FRONT by Pamela Brown If you happened to be in Nantes, France, last fall, on a given day while taking your afternoon café on the Rue de Cinquante Otages, you may have seen a young Asian girl walk past in a t-shirt that read: "Je ne suis pas une imigree![I am not an immigrant!]" Or perhaps if your European Integration professor said this about racism on the first day of class: "We don't have a race problem here in France except in the central [provinces] where there are too many North Africans." Or if, by chance, you happened to read the article on page one of the December 21st issue of the International Herald Tribune announcing that, according to a recently released Guardian poll, 48 percent of French people describe themselves as "openly" to "quite racist." Maybe if you were aware of the growing "race problem" in France, then you would be able to explain how Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme right-wing political party the National Front (FN), won 15 percent of the popular vote in last year's polls. Furthermore, Le Pen's popularity has not seemed to suffer a bit from a recent conviction in French courts last December for comments that the Nazi gas chambers were "a mere footnote in history." But perhaps you've never heard of the FN. When I began my semester abroad in France last September, extremist right-wing political parties were the last thing on my mind. My only concerns regarding discrimination were that someone would try to rip off the dumb American who didn't know how much change she should be getting back when buying a baguette. On November 29, however, I wasn't buying any baguettes. That morning my host family warned me that it wasn't safe to go into town by myself because local FN supporters had scheduled a demonstration for that afternoon. So I stayed in the house all day. And I didn't see anything. And in the following days, national police were all about town to maintain order. And I guess I was supposed to feel "safe" again. I didn't. I traveled halfway around the world to step out of the confines of being a "hyphenated" American. That day was the first time in my life that I ever longed to be back home in Dixie. Disguised as a nationalistic movement, the FN has been quietly amassing an increasingly vocal network of supporters and winning political control of the municipalities of Orange, Toulon, Marignane, and Vitrolles-en-Provence. Le Pen regularly appears on television and radio news programs claiming that his agenda is strictly "pro-French." On their official website, the FN presents an explanation of the motivations behind their political agenda: "Nowadays, the identity of France is threatened by the cosmopolitan view held by the political establishment. The Front National sees itself as [a] bastion of national identity against cosmopolitan projects aimed at mixing peoples and cultures. Far from being racist or [a] xenophobe, Jean-Marie Le Pen fights to defend the French people so that they are given priority over foreigners and so that their basic rights are respected" (http://www.front-nat.fr/welcome.html). Currently in France, unemployment figures hover around two million, and it is easy for many "native" Frenchmen to attach the blame to immigrants, primarily North Africans. It is the contention of the FN that no immigrant deserves to have a job while unemployment exists among white French people. Further, the FN blames immigrants for the decline in morals in modern society: "Immigrants are the drug dealers selling substances to your children; those who could be sleeping with your wife or daughter or son without your knowledge; the ill who take over hospital beds that could be used for native Frenchmen; carriers of alien illnesses; and those who slow your child's education by introducing strange cultures and language." (Jean-Marie Le Pen, Le Hebdo National, 1981). Therefore, the principal political aim of the FN is the reversal of the French immigration policy, and not just the end of immigration, but a strategy of deporting citizens based on their nation of origin. Le Pen's 50-point plan, introduced in 1991, which calls for the government to gather immigrants in internment camps until they can be deported, strongly resembles Nazi propaganda of WWII Germany, and so does his rationale that immigrants are somehow inferior to "native" French people and therefore not deserving of the same rights even if they have been naturalized as citizens. Only one class of immigrants merit citizenship according to the FN. Charges of racism leveled against the FN stem mainly from the fact that their xenophobic attitude does not extend to immigrants of European origin. At present, the president of the Ile de France chapter of the organization is of Italian descent. Europeans make the only acceptable immigrants for the FN because they can be more easily assimilated into mainstream French culture. That actually makes a certain logical sense. In that same poll that ranked French racism at 48 percent, Belgium and Austria also showed levels of "avowed racism" near 50 percent. Nearly a third of all Britons also admitted to racist attitudes. In fact, every one of the EU countries that were part of the Guardian poll released last December, with the exception of Portugal, Sweden and Luxembourg, reported levels of racism over 20 percent. The odds must have been working in my favor because no one ever accused me of selling drugs to their children or carrying an alien illness. I never had any contact at all with the National Front. That sure isn't much of a story, but what do you want? In case you haven't heard, racism sucks.

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