
Near the end of this hectoring exercise in partiality, Nabila Ramdani announces that “the Algerian war is over”. Given that many of her preceding 300 pages have been devoted to arguing the opposite, this is odd. But, then, so is the gap between her book’s overfamiliar inventory of a generalised France, one that will only feed British smugness – police brutality, entrenched corruption, racism, class prejudice, pillage, educational inequality and anti-social housing projects “protected” by Mafia-like drug-dealers – and the high ambition of her title, Fixing France, which promises a remedial programme that is in fact hardly addressed (then proves feeble when it is).
Ramdani pores over the above commonplaces of the French condition with undissembled parti pris. France, to my mind, is needlessly penitent: Emmanuel Macron’s characterisation of colonisation as a “crime against humanity” was naïve, and Algeria’s boasts of autonomy are fragile. Decolonisation has never been entire.
But Ramdani, who has worked as a lecturer and journalist in Britain and America, has acquired both impressively fluent, if functional, English prose and, less happily, what the French call an “Anglo-Saxon” mindset: her writing relies on concepts such as neo-puritanism, Islamophobia and diversity. Pursuing “fairness” for the 8.8 per cent of the French population that is Muslim would mean positive discrimination, which is a strategy that a republic proud of its logic and its “colour blindness” regards with distaste. Ramdani, while arguing this, fails to acknowledge the rise of anti-Semitic islamo-gauchisme.
Ramdani herself was brought up by Algerian parents who fled that tragic country to a euphemism: a “Sensitive Urban Zone” in the Parisian banlieue. But she seldom transmits an impression of her early life as a direct, unmediated impression. In fact, her book overall depends on scholarly borrowing rather than first-hand experience, though that would have been a problem, given that she was born after the way was paved to independence by the 1962 Evian Accords, de Gaulle’s betrayal of the pieds noirs (those of European descent resident in French Algeria).
This may explain Ramdani’s assertion that the latter led a “glamorous colonial lifestyle”, which is idiotic: their only fault was gullibility. These petty functionaries, shopkeepers and dirt farmers, of whom around 800,000 had to be evacuated to France after 1962, had misread le Général’s “je vous ai compris.” It had nothing to do with sympathy: it meant “I’ve got the measure of you.” De Gaulle was more directly cruel when he referred to harkis, the soldiers loyal to France who would be slaughtered in their thousands after independence, as “ce magma de supplétifs qui n’a jamais servi à rien” (“this mass of auxiliaries which has never been any use”).
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaJqfpLi0e82opWaemZjBqrvNaKmerpmaxG6yyLGgp59dm7%2BiusKeZKeZkp65onnRmqSdmZ6efA%3D%3D