On both sides of the Atlantic, commentators and activists have reacted with growing fury to the French government’s expulsion of hundreds of Roma, or Gypsies, to Bulgaria and Romania. Many critics liken these expulsions — as well as the threat to strip lawbreakers of their French citizenship — to the deportations of Jews organised by France’s Vichy regime during the second world war. It’s hard to know what is more outrageous: the policies practiced by President Sarkozy or the analogies proffered by his critics.
Vichy has no monopoly on xenophobic reflexes and exclusionary policies in the history of modern France. Over the course of the 20th century, it was the French republic that laid the administrative and legal foundations for official discrimination against the Roma.
As in real estate, so in history: location—in this case, temporal location—counts for a great deal. In 1912, the French republican government passed a battery of laws ostensibly aimed at vagrancy. Yet the government revealed its hand when it created an identity card that specifically targeted Gypsies. while the French law did not specify “Gypsies” but instead used the term “nomads,” the instructions to local officials lent themselves to racial identification. (This has recently been repeated in Arizona’s proposed anti-immigrant law.)
The identity cards allowed French authorities to track the movements of Gypsies during the first world war, but they were rarely interned in camps. This policy soon changed, though. By the mid-1930s, with the great influx into France of political and religious refugees from central and eastern Europe, the republic created a new kind of identity card that, as the historian Pierre Piazza notes, sought “to delimit more rigorously the contours [of the national community] and to better locate those who did not make up part of it.”
With relentless logic, there followed the creation of dozens of “special centres”—soon to become concentration camps—for refugees recently arrived on French soil. At the same time, the republic passed a law empowering officials to strip recently naturalised citizens of French nationality. Finally, shortly before the German invasion in the summer of 1940, the republican government ordered local officials to herd “nomads” into assigned areas. In justifying its action, the government declared: “Wandering individuals generally without a home, a homeland, or an actual profession, constitute a danger for national security…that must be removed.”
When Vichy came into existence a few months later, it built upon policies and structures introduced by the now-defunct republic. But the popular view of Vichy – as a rupture in history, four years that had nothing in common with what went before or what followed — cedes to a more accurate rendering, which shows important and unsettling continuities between democratic governments and authoritarian regimes in France.
Of course, the republic would never have applied a racialist policy towards Gypsies and Jews as Vichy did, much less participate in the systematic deportation of the two groups to the death camps. In this respect, Vichy and the French republic have nothing in common.
Nonetheless, the continuities between democratic and authoritarian phases in French history lead to a more general observation, often overlooked: the tendency of all democracies to isolate and discriminate against certain minorities. Democracies are as likely as authoritarian states to practice xenophobic or racist politics. While Sarkozy’s policies may be unworthy of the French republic, as his critics insist, they are not unprecedented.
Thinkers from Plato to Tocqueville have commented on the dangers inherent in the rule of the majority — especially when the majority is swayed by the passionate actions and speeches of the few. The lot of the Roma in contemporary France and Romania is a case in point. While these democracies do not subject their Roma populations to the punitive, at times fatal, policies pursued by Pétain’s France or Ceauşescu’s Romania, they do relegate them to the margins of their societies.
In present day Romania, the Roma population has a poverty rate three times higher than the national average, with low life expectancy, low rates of literacy and 100% unemployment in some areas. Since becoming a candidate and then a member of the European Union, the Romanian government has reluctantly designed initiatives aimed at facilitating integration of the Roma. Affirmative action programmes and the appointment of local level educational and health mediators have been the most publicised. But the effectiveness of these programmes has at best been limited, and anti-Roma sentiments continue among Romanian policy-makers, reflecting local public opinion trends.
Romanians now see the French expulsions as proof that integration of the Roma into any European society is mere utopia. So the actions of the French government are undermining the already frail attempts at implementing policies that would target Roma discrimination in Romania.
As for France, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the European Green Party, says that Sarkozy has “taken the French for fools” in pursuing his anti-Roma policy. Perhaps. But according to recent polls that reveal a nation evenly divided over the issue, Cohn-Bendit’s claim means that nearly half the French population are fools.
We need only consider earlier republican laws aimed at the Gypsies, passed in 1912, 1938 and 1940, to see that xenophobia flared at those moments when France faced the threat of war. Moreover, on the eve of both wars, France was awash in fears over the nation’s declining birthrate and its capacity to maintain its historical legacy as a dominant economic, cultural, political and military power.
While the French republic doesn’t now face the prospect of war, it does face other crises: economic stagnation, decaying inner cities and a top-heavy state staggering under the increasingly unrealistic expectations of the public. It must also wrestle with perplexing questions of national identity and national security provoked by an EU that continues to extend its writ. Here’s the rub for Sarkozy, and blessing for the Roma: the EU, long criticised for its “democratic deficit,” may now become the defender of last resort for Europe’s last stateless people, the Roma.