A Historian’s Timely Clarity on Elites and Demagogues: Reading Gerard Noiriel’s Le Peuple Français: Histoire et polémiques

One of the first French scholars to study the history of immigration, Gérard Noiriel has devoted his career to this subject in the context of historical research on workers’ movements, xenophobia, racism and populism. In Anglophone circles he is known for two major works: The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship and National Identity (oft-cited by IFE students researching immigration-related issues, as well as by many many others) and Workers in French Society in the 19^th and 20^th century.

An eminent social historian, Noiriel is also widely known in France and Europe for a career-long reflection on the role of social science intellectuals in the public space. “I think academics may intervene in all spheres of public life, but they must always be clear about the nature of their production so as not to legitimize their political options in the name of science,” he writes. At the same time, Noiriel has written about the importance of intellectuals’ limiting their public pronouncements qua experts to their areas of expertise. In Le Peuple Français: Histoire et polémiques, Noiriel performs a masterful act in bringing immense learning and decades of reflection to bear on the crucial, profound issue of belonging and identity, which is being politically misused to create dangerous rifts in French society. By his rigorous sense of separation this is a work of history and not a pamphlet, a survey based on extensive scholarship, yet addressed and accessible to any reader, in keeping with Noiriel’s lifelong commitment to the role of public intellectual. Almost never uttering the word ‘populism,’ the author instead – as befits a scholar who as a thesis student was told “the history of immigration is no place to begin a career” – keeps his focus at ground level as he sets the record straight on long-haul themes in the history of the formation and vicissitudes of the French people.

In two hundred pages, Noiriel draws significant and nicely illustrated lessons from the history of early popular revolts, then revolution, democracy and fear of lower classes, immigration, gender, colonialism, the we/they divide of racism and xenophobia, religion in a secular society, and the misuse of history. He makes it clear that – for his purposes – le peuple means simply, well, everyone. Unlike Marxists who refer mainly to the laboring classes with this term, or ancient and medieval uses that excluded slaves or, even later, those without property, or women, or immigrants, etc. The author’s overall lesson is that the rhetorical dishonesty used by conservatives today to pit ordinary people against the elite class (of which they themselves are fully a part), has deep, anti-democratic roots. Noiriel’s subject is France, but as he states, and as is clear to any reader from elsewhere, the lesson has global import.

One of several leitmotifs which emerge from a reading of this book is the theme of enlightened concepts being turned inside out and used by reactionary forces. These include, tellingly, the very notion of “the people”, which for centuries stood for social forces, often revolutionary, and which now in the mouths of right-wing politicians is placed in opposition to rule-by-law. In a historically and legally nonsensical twist, the sovereign people, the only just source of law in the republic, are now cast as victims of a so-called republic of the judges. In the same way, the extreme right, historically opposed to the democratic republic, now poses as the defender of republican values against the rising tide of iniquitous foreigners.

Another example central to Noiriel’s thesis is in the area of communication, whose increased capacities once fueled social movements (the printing press facilitating the Reformation, increased literacy and journalism playing a role in revolutionary France), whereas now powerful digital media capacity drives demagoguery and social fragmentation, while media conglomerates dictate both what’s news and who is right.

Raising the issue of supposed insecurity in current society (a major talking point of the extreme right), the author employs a social historian’s command of data to point out that contemporary France is a great deal more pacific and humane than in any previous period in the modern era. But for-profit news organs thrive on sensationalism, and terrorist attacks in the last two decades have surprised a pacified society, while political forces on the right and even the center compete in fear-mongering and security legislation. The secondary benefit of the latter for governments is to accustom the people to freedom-infringing public measures, with the unfortunate effect of re-invigorating latent we/they attitudes towards the other.

Noiriel goes on to summarize the history of the place of women in society and their role in constructing le peuple. He also examines immigration in a chapter where he takes pains to debunk much of what is heard in social and mainstream media as well as from right-wing pols around the “good” immigrants of the past (rarely viewed as such at the time) versus today’s “bad” immigrants. The colonial legacy comes up for examination by Noiriel, who finds that the fevered manner in which this legacy is discussed, on all sides, serves only to further divide society.

In the chapter devoted to a historical look at racism, drawing on recent research, the author exposes how elite discourse by “the public speech professionals” has warped perceptions and studies of racism in society during the period of that last few decades when the latter has become not only a more prominent subject but also a crime. The distortions include new stereotypes, biased survey instruments, and terms of discourse from on high that do not reflect street-level reality, while masking elite racism with subtle re-formulations. Noiriel then looks at the secular laws (la laïcité) establishing church/state separation and also intended originally to shelter public spaces and institutions from (a very real) ecclesiastical overreach. This chapter asks “Why has secularism not put an end to wars of religion?” The author concludes that the so-called new secularism is largely a journalistic construction sensationalizing this “foreign” religion of Islam in even its secular cultural expressions. The “new secularism”, Noiriel demonstrates, has – perversely – made religion once again an affair of state.

Noiriel reserves the final chapter for a resounding appeal to the wisdom of the great 20^th century historian, co-founder of the Annales and Resistance martyr, Marc Bloch (and clearly an inspiration to Noiriel the historian and engaged intellectual), developing Bloch’s distinction between “memory-history” and “scholarly-history”. While the former is important in the construction of society’s collective memory, the latter is needed for accuracy and setting the record straight. Scholarly history has also a vital role to play in popular education, a theme dear to Bloch and to Noiriel, but – in another example of elite failure vis-à-vis popular life – political and intellectual leaders have ignored this responsibility, leaving historical narration (when they’re not joining the production team) to snazzy television productions that appeal to emotions. This example of elite failure, joined to other instances throughout, forms one of the main themes of this work. Noiriel’s book is a successful attempt to set the record straight on the social reality of today’s France, based on historical knowledge and calling out both elitism and demagoguery.