Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
2 - Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
Summary
To depart from the present in order to deduce the past from it is a way to feed the history of the winners at the cost of the vanquished, the history of those who have left a trace of their passage at the cost of the invisible, of those without voice … the large majority of foreigners who have immigrated to France in the past have not stayed. These tens of millions of people have given their opinion on ‘the Republican model’ through the only means of expression that the Republic has left to them: by fleeing to other, more hospitable regions – that is to say, by ‘voting with their feet’ (Noiriel 2002: 2, my translation).
Why reintroduce assimilation?
Assimilation is a rather unfriendly concept when used in a social context. In French, it generally means an act of the mind that considers (something) as similar (to something else). A relevant secondary meaning is the action of making (something) similar (to something else) by integration or absorption. This meaning has existed in physiology since 1495. Around 1840, the concept was related to social processes for the first time, as the act of assimilating persons and peoples; the process through which these persons, these peoples, assimilate (themselves). This connotation incorporates terms like ‘Americanisation’ and ‘Frenchisation’. The older physiological connotation shines through in early politico-sociological discourse about assimilation. André Siegfried, for example, one of the first French political scientists to become occupied with immigration in the mid-20th century, spoke of ‘the assimilation of these immigrants, inserted into the American organism in massive doses’ (quoted in Noiriel and Beaud 1989, my translation).
Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (1989) provides a cruel and ironic summary of assimilation in the story of adolescent Indian Salahuddin Chamcha's arrival at an English boarding school. The first thing that we learn about Salahuddin's contacts with ‘the English’ is that his classmates giggle at his accent and exclude him from their secrets. Yet these exclusions only increase Salahuddin's determination to become English. He begins ‘to act, to find masks that these fellows would recognise, paleface masks… until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us’ (Rushdie 1989: 44).
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- Information
- Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of MulticulturalismFrench Modernist Legacies, pp. 59 - 82Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013