Alain Finkielkraut and the Problem of Identity
The French Academy was founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu during the reign of Louis XIII. Its purpose was to maintain the standards of French language and literature, and it remains a bastion of French culture. There are only forty members, and each is elected upon the death of a member by the remaining thirty-nine.
Alain Finkielkraut is one of the Immortals. He is also a public intellectual whose face is well known from his television appearances. His parents were Polish Jews who met in France after the war; his father had emigrated to France in the 1930s and had been deported to Auschwitz. They were granted French citizenship. Alain was born in 1949 in France (Finkielkraut, p. 108).
Early in the Gilets jaunes Saturdays, on February 14, 2019, Finkielkraut was attempting to return home when he was accosted by a part of a group that was attempting to get through to the Champs Élysées. The subtitles in French are clear enough, and so is the tone:
Kim Willsher of The Guardian, who interviewed Finkielkraut afterwards, noted that he was clearly shaken by the experience. “I am home, but not to these people,” he said. “Those who shout ‘go back to Tel Aviv’ believe Israel is stolen land, so what they are saying is that I have no place here. I have no place there . . . that I have no place on earth.” Finkielkraut went on to say that, “I’m not afraid, let’s not exaggerate, and I’m not going to change the way I live, but it’s worrying that, not being anonymous, I am now at the mercy of the merest cretin who wants to attack me. And it’s clear there are now parts of France where I cannot go.”
One of those surrounding him, wearing the keffiyah (in support of Palestine) shouted, “We are the French people, France is ours.” Le Parisien almost immediately published a profile of him, identifying him only as Benjamin W., age 36, who sometimes went under the name “Souleyman.” He lived in Mulhouse. He was the son of an Algerian father and a French mother. He was a Muslim convert, and the only one in his family to practice the religion. His Facebook page showed that, in addition to his support for the Gilets jaunes, he also was a member of the Palestiniens de Mulhouse, with whom he had traveled to Libya. He liked video games. He had five children. He ran his own business, where he sold cellphones, and his store had good customer reviews. One of the members of his extended family stated that his relatives had seen him very little since his conversion, and they were not surprised to see him in “the scene with Finkielkraut.” A friend, however, described him as a good father, a gentle man, who would not have gone after Finkielkraut if he had met him alone in the street, but who was carried away by the high intensity of the crowd.
Benjamin W went on trial on the following May 22, on the charges of “public insult for reasons of origin, ethnicity, race, or religion.” (injure publique en raison de l’origine, l’ethnie, la race ou la religion). Alain Finkielkraut, who had refused to become a civil party to the case, was nevertheless permitted to deconstruct the meaning of the words of his attacker, at some length and with considerable skill. Benjamin W’s attorneys asked him what he thought of the “Great Replacement” theory (that migrants, both Muslim and people of color, are “replacing” the French Europeans); he stated that he disagreed with it. He was asked what he thought of Zionism, and responded that he disagreed with the politics of Israel, but found in anti-Zionism a “legitimate” theory that could nevertheless deviate into a “form of antisemitism.”
Then it was the turn of Benjamin W. He had recently lost his livelihood because of the episode. Asked why he had joined the gilets jaunes that day: “I went there in solidarity. People are suffering. If I am an activist, it is so that people get their rights back. We all have someone in the family who is in difficulty. . . . In the gilets jaunes, there are people of the extreme right, of the extreme left. I have my own cause: I’m a militant palestinian and anti-Zionist,” adding that he had recognized Finkielkraut and wanted to “tell him my positions.”
Though he “regretted nothing,” he made a partial excuse by noting that the day had been difficult and loud, as they dodged tear gas and police, and that what he had said had perhaps not been the best. The media coverage of his case up to this point had suggested that he was a “fundamentalist,” which his attorneys tried to knock down: he was not “fiché S,” that is, not tagged as a threat to national security; he was not a salafist. He had attended a radical mosque for about twelve years, but his attorney described that choice as a search for his paternal roots: he had been born in Constantine, Algeria, but his parents had divorced, and he had grown up in France without ever knowing his father.
The reporter, who described the spectacle of the trial as well as the content (Finkielkraut was polished, at home in front of the cameras, Benjamin W was hesitant, intimidated by the coverage), was particularly caustic in regard to the defendant’s attorneys, who rambled “sometimes incomprehensibly” through the history of zionism, the négritude of anti-colonialist Aimée Césaire, the politics of Iran, and finally ended on behalf of their client–who had shouted, among other things, “dirty zionist shit”–with this peroration:
We must not sacrifice Benjamin on the altar of political correctness. His words arise from the freedom of speech when face to face with an extremely provocative personality. The words of M. Finkielkraut do far more harm than those of my client. He [Finkielkraut] was cited in the manual of the terrorist Anders Breivik.
Benjamin W was found guilty, and was given a two month suspended sentence. Nevertheless, his attorney, Ouadie El Hamamouchi, declared his intention to appeal, on the grounds that what he had said was not antisemitic, but rather anti-zionist. (El Hamamouchi is also the attorney for the CCIF, the watchdog group for anti-Muslim statements and actions.)
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Anders Breivik was the extreme-right Norwegian terrorist who in 2011 killed 8 people with a bomb in the capital city, then shot up a youth camp and killed 69 more. A brief article in Libération, titled “The imaginary France of Anders Breivik,” noted that on the day of his attacks he had published an online manifesto in which he blamed France as “the most Islamicized country in Europe,” which was guilty of “having opened the gates of Europe to Islam,” and which had, apparently out of its own malevolence, created “Eurabia.” It was a matter of “poetic justice” that France was being destroyed by “its own Frankenstein.”
In his manifesto, Breivik cited the work of Alain Finkielkraut as an inspiration.
Finkielkraut is a television personality, a public intellectual, an essayist and an author of many books, whose 2013 publication, L’identité malheureuse (The Unfortunate Identity), had a modest popularity. Indeed, Alain Juppé, running for the primary nomination for president for Les Républicains, adopted as his campaign theme “l’identité heureuse” (the fortunate identity) under the mistaken impression that this phrase would be familiar enough to strike a chord with his followers. It wasn’t, but Juppé’s campaign stressed France’s diversity as her greatest asset, thus positioning him as a centrist.
Finkielkraut’s central contention in L’Identité malheureuse is his assertion–to put it most simply–that the French are unable to be proud of their heritage. They are made to feel guilty about colonialism. They are unable to claim anything uniquely European, but required to think of their past as an ever changing kaleidoscope of cultures. As for who “they” are? They are the français de souche, the native French, a term which they are no longer allowed to use.
Finkielkraut takes us through the most familiar terrain of Muslim sumptuary laws–the prohibition of the hijab in schools in 2004, the prohibition of the burqa in public–and then stops off at some events that are lesser known outside of France. He cherry-picks his quotations, he exaggerates, he creates crude stereotypes, and yet there is also the occasional grudging agreement.
For example, there was Sarkozy’s ill-fated 2007 campaign promise to create a Ministry of Immmigration and National Identity, and to use that ministry to spearhead a “National Debate,” a series of public meetings, on the subject. It was too clearly an attempt by Sarkozy to outflank the extreme right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen, and was not regarded as sincere. It was met with a massive petition drive–”We will not debate”–that forced Sarkozy to abandon the attempt several months later, to jettison the concept of “national identity,” and to move immigration back into the Interior department.
For Finkielkraut, however, it was Sarkozy’s Minister of Immigration, Eric Besson, who had felt the need to take “ideological precautions” in his announcement of the debates, who showed the extent to which the French had lost the right to claim the terrain: “France,” Besson proclaimed, “is neither a people, nor a language, nor a territory, nor a religion, it is an agglomeration of those who want to live together. There is no Français de souche, there is only a France de métissage (mixture)” (p. 102). Or there was also Sarkozy’s attempt in 2011 to create a Maison de l’histoire de France, met with the criticism that there was no history “of France,” but rather a diverse history “in France.” The project was abandoned. “France no longer occupies the picture,” Finkielkraut exploded, “it becomes the setting. It is no longer a singular collective, the substratum of an adventure or a destiny, but a receptacle of multiple histories. To neutralize the domestic identity, to kill the chimera, to the profit of diasporic and minority identities; to make a place, by disenchanting the nation with itself, for all the appurtenances and all the orientations (religious, ethnic, regional, sexual) marked with the seal of difference” (p. 104).
The result of this direction taken by the Left, by the elites (the ancestors of Islamo-gauchisme no doubt), was that the working classes have been lost, in large part, to the National Front (pp. 120-121).
As Marine Le Pen would realize, in her presidential campaign in 2017:
Thus, writing in 2013, Finkielkraut clearly foresaw what would become the common wisdom after the election of Trump, and after Le Pen’s ascent to the second round: the abandonment by the elites of the white working class, and a turning toward diversity, ethnicity, intersectionality, minority rights, with James David Vance’s moving Hillbilly Elegy becoming required reading in both the United States and France (Guilluy, p. 29). Thus Finkielkraut frequently seems attuned to the real absurdities forced upon us by–for lack of a better term–political correctness.
Except for his discussion of Muslims, and his sense of all Muslims as essentially the terrifying immigrant youth in the banlieue. He had previously gotten in some trouble after the massive riots that started just outside Paris in 2005, spreading to the rest of France and lasting for six weeks. Finkielkraut had described both the riots and their interpretation to Haaretz: “In France, they would like very much to reduce these riots to their social dimension, to see them as a revolt of youths from the suburbs against their situation, against the discrimination they suffer from, against the unemployment. The problem is that most of these youths are blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity. Look, in France there are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult–Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese–and they’re not taking part in the riots. Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an ethno-religious character.” This interview–which went further on in this vein–created an uproar in France, in the course of which, Frédéric Debomy noted, Finkielkraut claimed that he had been misquoted. But he hadn’t been. “Thus Finkielkraut has functioned for a long time,” wrote Debomy; “affirmation and denial.”
Subsequent studies of 2005 have suggested that Finkielkraut was not wrong in identifying the main perpetrators, but certainly wrong in terms of seeing an innate propensity to violence and criminality. (In fact the riots, which began with the deaths of two Muslim youths who were chased by police into an electrical power grid station, seem more comprehensible in the awakening that occurred after the death of George Floyd, the anger attributable, as Cathy Lisa Schneider has shown, to a pattern of discriminatory policing.)
Eight years later, Finkielkraut doubled down, linking his interpretation of the 2005 riots to the Muslim oppression of women. Speaking of photographs of the events: “No women in these images, but young, hooded, and ultraviolent men. No banners, no demands, no slogans, no organization, but the great silent clash of rapid movement in the night and Molotov cocktails” (p. 74). And Finkielkraut also makes a casual reference in L’Identité heureuse to Renaud Camus, author of The Great Replacement, quoting him in regard to the increasing acceptance of swearing and vulgarity in public life (p. 151).
Approving Camus. Agreeing with Camus.
Normalizing Camus.
At the beginning of this year, Finkielkraut was fired from his television gig, not for his ideas about Islam, but rather for his rambling apparent defense of political scientist and public intellectual Olivier Duhamel, who was recently accused of sexually abusing his stepson, starting when the boy was 14. Finkielkraut said that he was appalled, that it had been a “reprehensible act,” and then, as Roger Cohen notes, he “embarked on a series of musings,” about consent, reciprocity, and so on. L’Obs put together several of his past provocations, with different hosts, and this latest provocation, with the veteran David Pujadas.
Finkielkraut was doing, in fact, what he always does: tiptoeing to the edge, and then denying that he means what he seems to have said. His impassioned delivery, even his intellectual daring, has always carried him through, and he has always been able to rescue himself. But perhaps not this time. He claims that he has filed suit against LCI, for “defamation and wrongful termination.” Cohen quotes him directly, as he attempted to pirouette away from the implications of what he had said: “Pedophilia revolts me. My purpose was not to deny the crime, which I denounced emphatically, but to specify the crime. To find out the facts of what actually happened. But it seems that in such cases examination of the facts is viewed as a form of indulgence of the crime.”
Cancel culture strikes even the Academy.
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Header image by Shutterstock.com.
Kim Willsher, “‘I felt the hatred,’ says philosopher attacked by gilets jaunes,” The Guardian, February 24, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/24/alain-finkielkraut-winds-of-antisemitism-in-europe-gilets-jaune
Tomas Statius, “Au procès du gilet jaune qui a injurié Finkielkraut: ‘je voulais lui dire mes positions,’” in L’Obs, May 22, 2019.https://www.nouvelobs.com/justice/20190522.OBS13313/au-proces-du-gilet-jaune-qui-a-injurie-finkielkraut-je-voulais-lui-dire-mes-positions.html
Jean-Michel Décugis, Jérémie Pham-Lê and Bartolomé Simon, “Qui est Benjamin W., un des auteurs présumés des insultes contre Finkielkraut?”, Le Parisien, Februrary 19, 2019.https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/qui-est-benjamin-w-un-des-auteurs-presumes-des-insultes-contre-finkielkraut-19-02-2019-8015802.php
Gilles Varela, “Insultes antisémites contre Alain Finkielkraut: Qui est Benjamin W, le principal suspect placé en garde à vue?” 20 minutes, February 20, 2019. https://www.20minutes.fr/strasbourg/2455595-20190220-insultes-antisemites-contre-alain-finkielkraut-benjamin-w-principal-suspect-place-garde-vue
Alexandra Gonzalez, Clément Boutin, “Insultes antisémites envers Finkielkraut: l’homme condamné à deux mois de prison avec sursis,” BFMTV, July 12, 2019.https://www.bfmtv.com/police-justice/insultes-antisemites-envers-finkielkraut-l-homme-condamne-a-deux-mois-de-prison-avec-sursis_AN-201907120042.html
“La France imaginaire d’Anders Breivik,” July 27, 2011.https://www.liberation.fr/france/2011/07/27/la-france-imaginaire-d-anders-breivik_751634/
Angelique Chrisafis, “Nicolas Sarkozy says sorry for national identity ministry,” The Guardian, November 17, 2010.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/17/nicolas-sarkozy-immigration-apology
Dror Mishani, Aurelia Smotriez, “What Sort of Frenchmen are They?” Haaretz, November 17, 2005.https://www.haaretz.com/1.4882406
Frédéric Debomy, “Alain Finkielkraut, Renaud Camus et le poids des mots,” Mediapart blogs, March 15, 2019. (I found the reference to the Haaretz article in this post.)https://blogs.mediapart.fr/frederic-debomy/blog/150319/alain-finkielkraut-renaud-camus-et-le-poids-des-mots-0
Roger Cohen, “Another French Intellectual Falls after Comments on Abuse Accusations,” The New York Times, January 13, 2021.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/europe/french-intellectual-Alain-Finkielkraut-fired.html
Alain Finkielkraut, L’Identité malheureuse, 2013.
Christophe Guilluy, Le temps des gens ordinaires (Paris: Flammarion, 2020).
Schneider, Cathy Lisa. Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Accessed March 7, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zw739.
