France’s Ideals Are a Harder Sell Among Diverse Youth.

Government minister and teenagers clash.
By Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Meheut
France has long sought to create a secular, color blind republic. But the confrontation between a government minister and a youth convention shows how the new generation is questioning those values.

POITIERS, France – It was supposed to be a feel-good meeting to encourage civic-mindedness. More than a hundred teenagers from across France spent two days tackling the delicate topic of religion and discrimination. The government’s youth ministers, children of immigrants in their early 30s and like many people there themselves, came to listen.

“I don’t have any big speeches to do,” said Minister Sarah L. Harry.
Instead, last October’s meeting quickly turned hostile, opening the gap between French republican values and the emerging sensibilities of a new generation. The teenagers explicitly stated that their daily lives had nothing to do with the minister’s vision of France – a nation that is secular, colorless and equal opportunity.

When the minister began singing the national anthem, “La Marseilles,” some refused. “I will never sing it,” said a young woman in the Muslim veil.
France’s lofty universal ideals have long aimed to secure individual rights and social unity by ignoring religion, race, gender and other differences. Ms. L. Harry herself embodied the potential and admired the ideals that few have taken for granted.

Today those values are more likely to be met with suspicion by a younger generation that, according to polls, has a more liberal view of race, religion and gender in a diverse society. The age difference between the minister and his audience – only about 15 years – was in itself a measure of how quickly things were changing.
The meeting at a high school gymnasium in Poitiers, a city in western France, took place at a sensitive moment – days after a middle-school teacher was beheaded by an Islamist extremist who painted a caricature of the prophet Muhammad in a classroom. The speech was meant to be shown.
The conflict, initially covered by only a few journalists, was eventually picked up by national news organisations, such that the government launched a widespread crackdown on what were described as radical Muslim groups. It became part of a fierce debate over Islam and its place in the French Republic.
Recent interviews with key participants and Ms. L. Harry herself revealed a split that has not healed in the intervening months.

Some white teens were heavily involved with issues of social injustice through social media. Others were the children of working-class immigrants from France’s former African colonies who, unlike their parents, did not shy away from bridging the gap between French ideals and their daily lives.

Meeting a minister was to be the highlight of the programme.
Ms. El Harri, 32, the daughter of Moroccan Muslim immigrants and one of the youngest members of President Emmanuel Macron’s government, may have been the wildly successful older sister of many people there. But there were sharp differences as well. Her family was affluent: her father was a medical doctor who went to work in Africa, and her mother and stepfather owned a restaurant in Casablanca, Morocco.
Politically, she had accepted clear, conservative positions from at least her high school days, recalling classmates at the prestigious Lizzie Lute in Casablanca, where she spent part of her teenage years. Unlike the teenagers she encountered in Poitiers, Ms. L’Harry firmly embraced the lofty universal ideals of France.
France, she said in an interview at her office in Paris, represented an “opportunity”.
“It doesn’t look at you by your religion, it doesn’t look at you by the color of your skin, it doesn’t look at you from your parents’ position,” she said. “It gives you a chance to be a full citizen and make yourself into this treaty.”
Teenagers didn’t see it that way.
One of the participants was young Maukagni, now 16 years old, the daughter of a white French woman and an immigrant from a former French colony in Central Africa. For as long as she could remember, she wanted to join the national gendarmerie, the military police of France.
She grew up as a practicing Catholic, but many West African immigrants in her neighborhood in Poitiers showed her an interest in Islam.
The jawan saw things from both sides. At school, where France’s strict secularism forbids the wearing of any visible religious symbols, some of its teachers did not say anything about wearing crosses. But when she saw Muslim friends wearing the veil in public, she saw how many French people consider it radioactive.

The jawan saw him online on the eve of the minister’s visit.
“I said to myself, ‘She’s young,’” the young man recalled, “‘Maybe she’ll understand our problems.’”
In the video clip of the minister’s visit, one of the most vocal speakers was 15-year-old Carla Roy. Carla said she had heard a “sense of injustice” to the teens who had faced discrimination. She herself never knew it, having grown up in the Pyrenees, a small village in the southeast, as a white man.

It was only in the months before the convention, when she saw the video on TikTok and YouTube about the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, that Carla became more aware, she shared the sun-soaked courtyard of her family’s home. I recalled in an interview. .
“I’m white, I have privileges and I’ve never been detained,” she said.
Carla and two others took the stage to reveal to the minister the proposals the teens had voted on. The most popular plans called for more religious education in school and better police training.
They also wanted permission to wear visible religious symbols in high school—a break from the current law, but an idea supported by 52 percent of high school students, according to one fresh poll.
While the teen’s proposals were based on her personal experience, she felt that Ms. L. Harry answered briefly.

Oumer N’Diye, 19, a black teenager, described how police had stopped her nine times over the past two months to check her identity, a deep source of injustice and outrage among minorities in France.
In response, the minister told the students that the police force “cannot be racist because it is republican.” But there were “black sheep” among the police, she said, like anywhere else in society.
Carla wouldn’t have it. “When you go through an identity check nine times in two months because of the color of your skin, I don’t think it’s right, and I don’t think it’s a black sheep,” she told the minister.
Recently, Carla said she felt the minister used her frequent references to “the Republic” almost as a shield.
“It means everything and nothing,” said Carla.

Finally, Ms. L. Harry, who was expected to answer questions, left the gym to speak to some of the reporters present, leaving the audience confused and angry.
Omar was hopeful that the minister would return. “The fact that it’s Republican doesn’t preclude the fact that it can be racist,” he said of police in an interview at his home in Pau, a city in southern France.

Oumar, the son of Senegalese immigrants, said police officers, both white and black, asked him if he was Muslim during those nine halts. When they answered yes, the officers’ tone changed, often dropping the polite “vous” in addressing them, he said.
Seeing the minister going back in, Omar pressed him and asked what would happen to his proposals.
“I’m sorry, madam, minister,” he said, “but I think what we did this week was for nothing.”
In Pau, Oumer said, “If we were against the republic, we would not have gotten together to find solutions to make it better.”

But the minister was so upset by the teen’s comments that he later ordered a government inquiry into the convention. “His comments revealed “complete ignorance and worrying indifference to Republican principles,” his office wrote in a letter.
Investigators eventually blamed the event’s organizers for failing to instruct the youth on republican values.

Minister after the release of the report told the French news media, “Not one euro of public money should go to the enemies of the republic.”
Such events have been held together for a decade. Association of Social and Socio-Cultural Centers of France, a private, politically neutral organization that manages 1,250 outlets across the country.
Organizers denied the criticism, saying most teenagers had spent their lives in public schools where those values were taught. Federation president Tariq Tohria said the teen’s remarks were a barometer of France’s social problems, which had been “turned into a problem, a disease.”
Michel Fossell, a philosopher at the cole Polytechnique, said that French republicanism was being challenged precisely because it failed to integrate the children of immigrants and because, in the name of unity, it called for more uniformity.
“When the word republic is used in a context where, every time, it means standards, constraints, behavioral obligations, one should not be surprised that it receives less and less support,” Mr. Fossel he said.
The teens visiting Poitiers kept in touch, mostly on social media, and some were preparing to refute the report.
Oumar shares an apartment in Pau with his fiancée, a woman of Algerian descent, whom he had met at an annual gathering three years earlier. Her mother said, “outraged” by what she had heard at Poitiers, Clara went back to her village, and was now getting ready for another meeting.

A few days after the meeting was over, the young man converted to Islam. She now has second thoughts about becoming a gendarme for the French military because she “didn’t feel like working for a country that doesn’t love me.”
“I often say,” she said, “that I love a republic that doesn’t love me back.”
norimitsu onishi reported from Poitiers, Pau and Bordeaux, and continual mehut from the Pyrenees. aida alami Contributed reporting from Casablanca, Morocco.
Courtesy: The New York Times