• How to be French Patrick Weil, translated by Catherine Porter

    How to be French. Nationality in the Making, since 1789

    Patrick Weil - How to be French, version anglaise de Qu’est-ce qu’un Français ? Patrick Weil
    translated by Catherine Porter

     Weil's book, deftly translated by Catherine Porter, constitutes not only the definitive work on the history of French nationality laws but also a study that by any standards ranks as an outstanding piece of scholarship. Built on extensive archival work and encyclopedic knowledge of its subject matter, the book combines an often gripping history of French nationality laws with revealing comparative analyses referencing other Western states and a wealth of information in its appendixes that offers ready access to virtually every aspect of the subject.

    Although the details of nationality laws tend to be dry reading, their impact on individual human beings can be immense—opening rights of citizenship or raising threats of deportation and, in extreme cases, representing the difference between life and death. Weil succeeds in covering both the technical and the deeply human aspects by illustrating the effects of nationality laws through judiciously chosen case histories that provide revealing insights into key issues and trends. He is also exemplary in his handling of the explosive ideological charge that sometimes attaches to the politics of nationality laws, most notably during the occupation period, when the Vichy regime stripped thousands of Jews of French nationality, preparing the way for their deportation to Nazi death camps. Weil recounts these and more recent events relating to Muslims with remarkable restraint, allowing such civil servants and politicians as Georges Mauco and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to hang themselves, in effect, with their own racist or quasiracist words, which he quotes from public and archival records to devastating effect.

     The book is divided into three main parts, of which the first two trace the evolution of French nationality laws from the end of the ancien régime to the present time. Part 3 is framed in more thematic terms: In Chapter 7, Weil provides a valuable corrective to stereotypical images opposing France's so-called "republican" tradition to an "ethnic" model associated with Germany. In Chapter 8, he reviews the ways in which certain groups—women, colonial subjects, and naturalized persons—have been denied full citizenship while holding the formal status of French nationals. In Chapter 9, he offers a synthesis of current nationality laws and their administrative operation. Although the book might have benefited from a more extended theoretical discussion of the relationship between nationality and citizenship—drawing on such notions as Hammar's concept of denizenship and Bauböck's distinction between nominal membership and substantial citizenship to help more clearly grade and categorize the forms of discrimination discussed in Chapter 8—this invaluable study is certain to remain the standard work on the subject for many years to come.

    Alec G. Hargreaves
    From: Journal of Interdisciplinary History
    Volume 40, Number 4, Spring 2010 pp. 597-598 :
    http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_interdisciplinary_history/v040/40.4.hargreaves.html


     Qu'est-ce qu'un Français ?

     1803 : contre l’avis de Napoléon, en rupture avec le droit du sol qui dominait sous l’Ancien Régime et durant la Révolution, le Code civil fait prévaloir le principe de droit du sang. La nationalité se transmet désormais, comme le nom de famille, par la filiation. 1889 : la France, devenue pays d’immigration, attribue sa nationalité aux enfants nés et éduqués en France. C’est le retour du droit du sol. En 1927 enfin, démographie oblige, la nationalité s’ouvre massivement aux étrangers qui le désirent, par la naturalisation ou le mariage.

    Mais en 1803, la nationalité est un attribut de l’homme, au détriment de la femme (qui devient étrangère en épousant un étranger). En 1889, un statut de plus en plus infériorisé est imposé aux musulmans d’Algérie. En 1927 enfin, l’ouverture de la naturalisation a pour contrepartie la restriction des droits des naturalisés. Mais surtout, à partir de 1940, se produisent de véritables « crises ethniques » de la nationalité : antisémite sous Vichy, racialiste à la Libération, antimusulmane plus récemment.
    Objet, à gauche comme à droite, de croyance plus que de connaissance, sujet de nombreux affrontements politiques et juridiques, la nationalité française n’avait jamais vu son histoire reconstituée, analysée, interprétée. Voilà la chose faite.

    Duke University Press, 2008, 438 p.
    version anglaise de Qu’est-ce qu’un Français ? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (Grasset, 2002, éd. revue et augmentée Gallimard, coll. « Folio-Histoire », 2004).

    « Liberté, Egalité, Discriminations. L’« identité nationale » au regard de l’histoire - Patrick WeilBréviaire de l'amour expérimental de Jules Guyot préfacé par Sylvie Chaperon »

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