France’s war on woke, from the salons to the cinemas
Opposition to identity politics isn’t confined to the cultural right.
By CLEA CAULCUTTin Paris
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega for POLITICO
Trust the French to intellectualize the war on woke.
Roughly once a month, the crème of a very specific part of French society gathers at Le Laboratoire de la République, a think tank in central Paris, to warn against what it sees as a dangerous and divisive import.
The events hosted by the Laboratoire don’t just focus on so-called wokeness, but it’s a recurring theme. Speakers have included the French-Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud who has dismissed wokeism as “dangerous” and “boring,” the influential academic and Islam specialist Gilles Kepel who has denounced cancel culture in universities and Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who described wokeism as a “new totalitarianism.”
“We didn’t wait for [the woke generations] to tackle racism and sexism,” Heinich said in an interview with POLITICO. “Do they think they’ve invented these fights? We don’t need to ban speeches that don’t suit us to advance the fight against discrimination.”
Set up in 2021 by Jean-Michel Blanquer, a former education minister under President Emmanuel Macron, the think tank was set up to defend a “republican ideal” that transcends race and religion. Woke ideology, Blanquer recently argued in an interview in an elegant restaurant in central Paris, is “pessimistic” because it reduces people to representatives of groups with fixed identities that eclipse the individual: woman, Black, Muslim, gay. “This hodgepodge just creates more conflict in our societies,” he said.
In the United States, the anti-woke banner has been primarily hoisted by figures on the cultural right like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In France, however, while the main thrust of hostility comes from populists and the far right — most notably Eric Zemmour, head of the far-right Reconquest party — opponents to so-called wokeness can also be found among the establishment and even the cultural left.
The term is mostly used pejoratively by critics to describe what they see as a U.S.-driven shift in progressive values leading to the repression of plurality of opinions on gender and race and the promotion of minority identities at the expense of French unity.
“Our defenses against wokeness should be strong,” said Brice Couturier, the host of the Laboratoire’s monthly debates and a self-described leftist who has been critical of “Islamo-leftism” and “transgender ideology.”
“The Republican ideal is egalitarian,” he said. “It doesn’t sit well with the idea that identity, even racial identity, should become an important cultural marker.”
Le Laboratoire de la République
To reach the French headquarters in the war on woke, cross the Seine with the Louvre at your back, walk past the Musée d’Orsay and wander through the 7th arrondissement until you get to La Maison de l’Amérique Latine on the posh Boulevard Saint-Germain.
On a recent evening in January, university professors, intellectuals, and students mingled in a wood-paneled reception room drinking warm white wine, chatting in the wake of the Laboratoire’s guest speaker who had answered a Q&A on immigration and France’s relations with its ex-colonies.
“At my university, everyone criticizes what they call the domination of the white male,” said Lila Nantara, a 23 year-old cultural studies student who had come to hear the debate. “I think it’s a good cause and comes with good intentions, but woke ideas are an intellectual confinement that are harmful to scientific studies,” she added.
French hostility to so-called woke ideas arguably dates to the upheaval of the 18th century, when the revolutionaries didn’t just decapitate the king but set out to remake society from the ground up. In the place of the Ancien Régime dominated by clerics and noblemen, the Republic erected ideals of secularism and equality, in which ethnic, regional and religious identities were subsumed into universalized Frenchness.
Even today, the French government declines to keep statistics on the country’s ethnic and religious makeup, arguing that doing so would be divisive and reminiscent of the data collection during World War II that was used to round up Jews. And much of the debate about immigration, particularly from predominantly Muslim countries, has centered around objections to overt religiosity in the public sphere.
In recent years, concern about wokeness has reached the highest echelons of French politics. In 2022, Macron declared himself “against woke culture,” announcing his opposition to the removal of controversial historic statues. “We need to face our history,” he added. His wife Brigitte has expressed her opposition to gender-neutral pronouns. And the recently appointed conservative Culture Minister Rachida Dati pledged to fight wokeism, “a policy of censorship.”
“Wokeism is the idea to be ‘awake’ to fight discrimination,” said Ilana Cicurel, a member of the Laboratoire and a member of the European Parliament with Macron’s Renaissance party. “It’s hard not to share that objective. But we see a drift, the temptation to reduce people to their identities in the name of the fight against discrimination.”
Blanquer, who also comes from the right, says his participation in the battle was inspired at least in part by his time at Harvard University. “It’s there that I discovered political correctness, which is the premise of wokeism on U.S. campuses,” he said. “I become very concerned about the communitarian outlook, where everything is seen through the prism of belonging to one group or another.”
He cautioned that wokeness could serve as a thin wedge for totalitarian regimes looking to foster division in Western society. “Look at how the Chinese use TikTok or the way Qatar uses [Al Jazeera’s social media channels] AJ+, and how they exploit woke themes,” he said.
“In the name of wokeism, they encourage Islamism,” he added. “We need to be lucid about this.”
‘Culture of irreverence’
What’s distinctive about French anti-wokeness is that it’s by no means confined to the center or the right. It also has adherents on the left, with traditionalists facing off against new generations influenced by the conversation in the U.S.
The topic is so toxic that most politicians try to avoid it altogether, but there are many on the left who see identity politics as a renunciation of the battle for the working classes or a fore rider of American prudishness.
“Big business is playing with [wokeism], giving symbolic advantages to minorities, installing unisex toilets so trans people don’t feel discriminated against,” said Couturier, the leftist anti-woker. But “behind identity politics, the reality is that salaries aren’t going up.”
France is, after all, a country where Woody Allen, the film director accused by his adopted daughter of sex abuse, is still making movies; where Roman Polanski, who was convicted of statutory rape, gets film awards; and where Johnny Depp made his first film with a female film director after winning his defamation case against Amber Heard.
France “simply respects justice much more,” said Heinich, the sociologist. “Polanski is not facing charges here, unlike the U.S. The case is very old, and his victim has requested that the lawsuits stop. And Woody Allen has been totally cleared. So enough is enough.”
In France, the #MeToo movement was met with ambivalence, with the film star Catherine Deneuve defending “the right to seduce” and “the freedom to bother” women as part of sexual freedom in France. While some women have spoken out against abusive directors or actors, recent allegations of sexual misconduct against France’s best-known actor Gérard Depardieu have devolved into a brawl, with rival factions lining up on either side.
When it comes to race and religion, the left can sometimes be less concerned with intolerance than the right to offend, most famously embodied in the weekly Charlie Hebdo magazine. In 2015, Islamist gunmen incensed by lewd cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad attacked its offices, killing 12 people and sparking an outcry of support under the slogan “Je suis Charlie.”
“It is mostly the left that is very resistant to racial questions in France,” said Rokhaya Diallo, a commentator and anti-racist activist. “Universalism was first and foremost a value of the left, and then it was adopted by the right.”
French culture is “resistant to wokeism”, said Mathieu Bock-Côté, a conservative essayist and political commentator. “There’s a culture of irreverence here. If you tell a Frenchman that a man can be pregnant, he’ll burst out laughing.”
Sensitivities about race and religion, argue some on the left, are an American phenomenon, born out of a history of race relations that France — despite its history of colonialism — doesn’t share. “French culture resists wokeism because of an instinctive distrust of the U.S., either because they see it as U.S. imperialism or because they don’t think it’s part of their culture,” said Bock-Côté.
Boomerang
The irony for France’s anti-woke warriors is that the ideas behind it are, well, very French. It emerged from the writings and teachings of a group of colorful French intellectuals — including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, René Girard and Jean Baudrillard — who argued that truth is subjective and often determined by power relations.
Known as post-structuralism, or French Theory, their ideas gained popularity in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s through a series of writings and lectures, eventually giving rise to gender and decolonial studies. Later, Girard joked that he and his fellow French academics had brought “the plague” to America.
“Our problem is that French Theory, which has become crazy on U.S. campuses, is heading back to us like a boomerang in the form of postcolonial studies, gender studies, intersectionality,” Couturier wrote in his book “Ok Millennials!”
It’s rare these days for a week to go by without another French episode in the woke wars. In December, the winner of the Miss France beauty pageant was accused of having “woke hair” (a pixie cut). Last June, a prominent politician on the left was forced to quickly backtrack after suggesting 16-year-olds should receive parental consent before changing their gender. The values in French filmmaking also appear to be changing, with the prestigious César film awards announcing that directors and actors facing charges of sexual violence will no longer be allowed to speak or appear onstage during the ceremony.
As woke issues dominate the cultural debate, its opponents are worried they’re starting to lose the fight. While only 4 percent of the French support wokeness, according to the polling led by politics specialist Chloé Morin, some of its ideas are quietly taking root. Some 24 percent think people “should stop making caricatures of religions,” a 5 percent increase on 2015, and 41 percent think every level of society is affected by racism.
“I’m worried [France] will follow in the footsteps of the U.S. where wokeism is the dominant ideology on campus, in elite universities,” said Couturier. He added that students graduating have “soaked up this ideology.”
“It’s a bit like my experience growing up with Marxism,” he said “I really struggled to get rid of it, and often I’m still thinking in terms of class struggle. So I’m not that optimistic.”
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