Background and Methodology

The lead author of this article, Abigail Taylor, interviewed eighteen French citizens between May–July 2016 and July–August 2018. All of them offered assistance or shelter to undocumented migrants fleeing from the Middle East, and Northern and sub-Saharan Africa. Crucially, however, they did so illegally and in defiance of the French state which criminalized unauthorized offers of assistance and shelter to undocumented migrants. In France, this behavior violates Article L.622-1 of the French Criminal Code that regulates the Entry and Residence of Foreigners and the Right to Asylum (abbreviated CESEDA). This law—originating in 1938, legislated in its current form in 2005, but actively enforced from 1986Footnote ¹—states that an individual found guilty of “directly or indirectly assisting or attempting to assist the illegal [irrégulier] entry, movement or residence of a foreigner in France will be sentenced to a five-year prison term and a €30,000 fine.” The citizens we interviewed—who, in this article, we refer to as “hosts”—were committing what the French press has termed a “délit de solidarité”, a crime of solidarity, by assisting migrants who had entered France without the requisite documentation or visa.

The interviews took place in homes and workplaces in Calais, Paris, Marseilles, and the southeast of the country (Provence-Alpes). Interviewees were recruited via several methods of purposive sampling. Recruitment leads for four initial interviewees came from existing contacts in Marseilles working with undocumented and other displaced peoples by providing social support, legal advice and accommodation (at state-funded Centres d’accueil des demandeurs d’asile [Asylum Seeker Reception Centers] and regional chapters of the nationwide non-governmental and civil society organizations, La Cimade and the Réseau Hospitalité [Hospitality Network]). The remaining fourteen participants were recruited from this group through snowball sampling (in which the initial contact recommended other people known to them, and so on) or else identified and contacted through publications and communications (websites, newsletters, social media pages, flyers, press releases, media reports) of French organizations. Recruits within the snowball sample were informed prior to us making contact, which made those approached more open to the idea of a formal interview. The remainder were referred or sourced directly by the researcher and contacted over e-mail or text message without the person’s advance knowledge of being recruited for the study.

The tenuous legality of these French hosts—explaining, in great part, a generalized reluctance to speak publicly of their acts—made sampling members of this difficult-to-reach population via purposive sampling especially appropriate (Neuman Reference Neuman2011, 268). Classic examples of this approach are with people whose action is concerned with illegality, such as drug users (Becker Reference Becker1963). This last point accounts for our relatively small sample size of eighteen. Although we started off with more than thirty direct recruitment leads from our four initial contacts, only twelve people agreed to an interview. Two more came forward after learning about our study. Once identified, considerable time and effort was applied toward gaining the French hosts’ trust. Typically, this involved a process of direct interaction in online discussion boards and forums on dedicated websites and apps, in addition to social networking sites. Hosts were invited to participate in interviews after an average of six to twelve months from initial contact, allowing for a sufficient period of time for the researcher/host relationship to strengthen and manage concerns about their security and anonymity. The caution and fear exhibited by participants in their interviews is unsurprising; at least one research participant was under strict judicial orders which prevented them from speaking to the media. Nevertheless, these interviews allowed us to uncover commonalities and dissonances that produced a “structure of comparability” for an otherwise geographically, culturally, and socially diverse group of individuals (May Reference May2001, 123). Moreover, the decision to conduct semi-structured yet largely “tailor made” interviews over alternate methods such as broader surveys or questionnaires, allowed us to collect a dataset that reflected individual and highly personalized motivations for hospitality.

All interviews were conducted in French and lasted between one and two hours, and were face to face, one-on-one, and semi-structured. Of the eighteen respondents, eight are female, and ten are male. Interviewees ranged in age from twenty-five to eighty-one years and from across occupational fields (including students, social workers, lawyers and legal professionals, academics, farmers, journalists, and workers in the transportation sector). Our aim was to determine the motivations for hospitality on the part of the hosts themselves and to examine in detail questions concerning the wider conception and practice of hospitality. The interview schedule asked participants:

1. 1. Please describe some of the actions you have undertaken as a way of assisting irregular or undocumented migrants.

2. 2. In your opinion, why do you think France criminalizes the solidarity of its citizens towards undocumented migrants?

3. 3. French leaders and authorities often evoke a “proud history and tradition” as a hospitable nation, yet at other times, seem to deny this idea of hospitality. What do you think is going on?

4. 4. I want to draw out some of the motivations that might lead someone to help another person, even it means defying laws that forbid it. What drives you most to help?

5. 5. What, if anything, is there about being French that motivates you to help foreigners in need?

Discussion was prompted informally by questioning, reassuring interjections, and listening to the respondent in a way that encouraged them to talk. A list of formal prompts was scripted into the interview schedule to probe for further details if the respondent wasn’t forthcoming (Leech Reference Leech2002, 668).

These interviews are the inspiration for the wider claims we make about hospitality in this article. In conducting them we did not set out to confirm pre-identified motivations for hospitality. Rather, as is expected with qualitative methodologies, our claims were reached inductively (Bernard and Ryan Reference Bernard and Ryan2010, Creswell Reference Creswell1994, Silverman Reference Silverman2010). The answers given by the hosts challenged our received understanding of what motivated their actions, and this led us to literatures in political theory (particularly around conceptions of care, which we discuss later), as well as to studies in political psychology (Monroe Reference Monroe1994, 2004, 2012), humanitarianism (Malkki Reference Malkki2015) and human rights (Celermajer Reference Celermajer2018, Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre2018), to make sense of why citizens offer assistance to needy strangers. From these sources, and grounded by the interviews, we formulated the thesis of this article: that it is analytically and normatively useful to distinguish three reasons for why private citizens in liberal democracies offer hospitality to undocumented migrants.

Before we begin, three caveats should be raised. First, the hosts we interviewed did not themselves neatly distinguish between these categories of care. As we will see, they moved freely between them, often using one to buttress the other. In separating these categories, we do not mean to impose any kind of strict isolation. The reader should consider each form of care as a heuristic that, while in principle distinct, is in practice often entwined with others. Distinguishing these different kinds of care is a first and necessary step in demonstrating just how complex the motivations for hospitality can be.

Second, we characteristically speak of the motivations behind hospitality rather than the justifications or explanations given for it. This is a delicate issue as it raises the intractable problem of whether or not the language people use to justify their actions in fact mirrors their interior motivations. Yet in our interviews it is precisely the motivations of our hosts that we sought to elicit: to ask them to reflect on why they do what they do. Such reflections, of course, deliver justifications and explanations, which we have thematized under the categories of care for others, world, and self. Nevertheless, our aim is to tap into the reasons and desires—the psychology, if you will—underlying their provision of hospitality. For that reason, we favor the language of motivation rather than justification, but without meaning to imply a strong distinction between the two.

Third, we do not claim that the reasons voiced by our hosts explain why citizens anywhere and everywhere practice hospitality. Given how embedded their reasons are in French history and traditions, they do not necessarily carry over to other countries and contexts. Similar instances of “crimes of solidarity” are currently taking place in Europe (in Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland), Morocco, and the United States. It would be surprising indeed if, say, our hosts’ remarks on French republicanism translated to these other places. Nevertheless, these limitations do not affect our goal: to highlight a diverse yet under-appreciated set of motivations for the practice of hospitality. The insights we extract from the basis of these interviews, in other words, are not meant to be generalized to a wider population of hosts (whether French or otherwise). Our intent, rather, is to use their remarks to better understand the concept and practice of hospitality itself. The categories of care we have extrapolated are broad enough, and the specific reasons raised by the hosts specific enough, to stimulate future investigations of hospitality along these lines.

Hospitality

Hospitality can take many forms and the definition we adopt is expansive. Given that this article is based on the reflections of hosts whose behavior is criminalized by their own state, we will use the wide conception of hospitality laid out by the law that proscribes it (Article L.622-1 of the French CESEDA Criminal Code), as “assisting or attempting to assist the illegal [irrégulier] entry, movement or residence of a foreigner.”

What kind of acts are covered? Here are a few examples: our hosts drove injured asylum seekers to seek medical care, volunteered at soup kitchens, guided individuals through an unfamiliar legal system to access their rights by, for instance, filling out forms or accompanying them on administrative visits. They helped migrants find language instruction so that they could navigate not just the law, but French social and cultural life as well. Our hosts offered seemingly small forms of succor that more privileged members of society take for granted, such as the ability to charge a phone, wash clothes, and source the materials necessary to build a makeshift home or shelter (for example, tents, tarpaulins, ropes, and the like). Finally, of course, they welcomed undocumented migrants into their homes, offered them beds, prepared meals, and provided a temporary haven from precarity and homelessness. Each of the hosts we interviewed combined many such acts of assistance, which they explicitly understood in terms of offering hospitality.

Scholarship on hospitality in political science tends not to focus on such nitty-gritty forms of assistance. It is principally concerned with hospitality in connection with international law and human rights. There are two main issues. First, scholars working within the law of nations tradition from Vitoria to Kant focus on the possibility of designing domestic and international laws of hospitality to regulate how states might welcome unplanned-for or uninvited foreigners who arrive at their borders (see Anderson-Gold Reference Anderson-Gold2001; Baker Reference Baker2011a, b, 2013; Brown Reference Brown2010; Cavallar Reference Cavallar2002, 2013; Friese Reference Friese2010; Onuf Reference Onuf2009 2013). Second, a critical vein of scholarship focuses on restrictive migration laws and border controls, and criticizes liberal democracies that adopt them for not going far enough to protect refugees and asylum seekers (see Allsopp Reference Allsopp2012; Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004; Benhabib et al. Reference Benhabib, Waldron, Honig and Kymlicka2006; Bessone Reference Bessone2015; Honig Reference Honig and Benhabib2006; McNevin Reference McNevin2011; McNevin and Missbach Reference McNevin and Missbach2018; Nyers Reference Nyers2006, 2018).

These literatures are essential to contextualize France’s policy and action on hospitality, and especially, to explain why it has generated civil disobedience in the form of crimes of solidarity. Today, the French state readily and repeatedly evokes a long history, dating back to the Revolution itself, of extending hospitality to strangers in need (Burgess Reference Burgess2008, Noiriel Reference Noiriel1991). In the words of its president, Emmanuel Macron, “We must welcome refugees: it is our tradition and our honor. I call for the greatest humanity [humanité] in dealing with the migrant question” (Nouvel Observateur 2017). At the same time, however, the French state would appear to extend such hospitality only on condition that its newcomers, as future members, are seen to already espouse the key pillars of French republicanism: liberté, égalité, fraternité, along with that uniquely French interpretation of secularism, laïcité. From this perspective, any departure from these principles and received interpretations threatens to undermine the promise of universality that underscores French republican democracy and citizenship (Laborde Reference Laborde2008; Raissiguier Reference Raissiguier2010). That is why when it comes to needy outsiders, France’s policy does not rely solely on humanité (that is, on humanity and humaneness). It operates with an equal measure of fermeté (that is, with closure and firmness). Compare, for example, Macron’s full-throated support for humanité cited a moment ago, with the rather more qualified position from the Executive Office of the President (2016): “The government’s [immigration] policy … revolves around the complementary principles of humanité, by remaining faithful to our values and tradition of hospitality, and fermeté, by combatting irregular immigration.”

As we will see, what vexes so many of the hosts we interviewed is the way in which the French state simultaneously evokes and yet denies hospitality to justify its position on refugees and undocumented migrants. As such, their civil disobedience adds a powerful voice to critical scholarship on hospitality by matching its rebuke of liberal democratic states for not honoring their own ideals (see Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004; McNevin and Missbach Reference McNevin and Missbach2018). Moreover, by providing concrete and quotidian assistance, our hosts enact and exemplify what support for a law of nations—a “minimal transcultural moral standard” for irregular migrants (Cavallar Reference Cavallar2002, 75)—might look like on the ground amidst the deep pluralism of hosts and guests. We believe, however, that the most immediate lessons to be learned from our hosts pertain to the question of care, and specifically, what motivates the generous and risky assistance they provide. It is to this question we now turn.

Care for Others

We draw on three conceptions of care, each of which is associated with a political theorist or philosopher: care for others with Jacques Derrida, care for the world with Hannah Arendt, and care of the self with Michel Foucault. In each case, our use of the word “care” designates, on the one hand, an attitude of concern and interest (as in, to care about something), and on the other hand, a behavior of attending to and providing for (as in, to care for something). What changes in each case, of course, is the object in question—that is, care for others, world, and self—and with it the specific reasons as to why something is cared about and how it should be cared for. Together with our interviews, we use these three conceptions of care to build a multifaceted account of the motivations behind the provision of hospitality by private citizens in liberal democracies.

The notion of “care” in the social and political sciences is most prominently associated with the field of “care ethics.” Pioneered in the discipline of philosophy in the 1970s, it developed as an alternative to mainstream “justice-based” (and broadly Rawlsian) approaches in normative ethical and political theory (Gilligan Reference Gilligan1982; Noddings Reference Noddings2013). Since then, it has developed into a significant branch of political theory characterized by a relational approach to morality, one that stresses the interdependent nature of human beings, and with it, contextualism and an ethic of responsiveness to the needs of others (Engster Reference Engster2007; Engster and Hamington Reference Engster and Hamington2015; Tronto Reference Tronto1993).

Care ethics is, in a sense, perfectly suited to represent the predominant ethical and political orientation in hospitality studies. We could even say that it is as if care ethics was made to measure, given the priority it accords to mutual dependency, responsiveness, affective relationships, attention to need and precarity, and most pointedly, its demand for institutions and policies to help people in need. That said, scholars working in the field of hospitality primarily draw on a different source to formulate their view that hospitality is undertaken out of care for other people. Indeed, one particular thinker has exerted a tremendous influence and inspired a large secondary literature: Derrida and his Of Hospitality (2000) and related works (2001, 2002, 2005; see also Claviez Reference Claviez2013; Doty Reference Doty2015; Still Reference Still2010; Tataryn Reference Tataryn2013; Weber Reference Weber2013).

Part of the success of Derrida’s book is that he summarizes two major Western traditions in the history and philosophy of hospitality: the Abrahamic faiths and classical antiquity. The figures of the “stranger” and “foreigner” are central to each. The tale of Abraham (Genesis 18:1-15) who welcomes three strangers by offering his best provisions is paradigmatic of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic teachings on the ethical treatment of strangers (see Akins Reference Akins2004; Reaves Reference Reaves2016). Equally foundational are the many Greek stories and myths, from Homer to Plato, that prescribe generous assistance and protection to strangers as a way of honoring the gods. The underlying message in both traditions is that irrespective of identity, one is bound in sacred duty to freely give hospitality and any dereliction incurs divine wrath (see O’Gorman Reference O’Gorman, Lynch, Morrison and Lashley2007). Derrida’s text, in short, serves as a handy primer to introduce new audiences to the long tradition of hospitality at the heart of Western civilization.

That said, we suspect there is another reason for the outsize influence of this book. Surprisingly, perhaps, it is that despite the perceived radicalism and rhetorical excess of Derrida’s writings on hospitality, he adopts and employs a truism that orients virtually all studies of hospitality that we are aware of: that the main motivation to offer hospitality is out of care and concern for other, often vulnerable, people. Derrida’s main argument about hospitality is that it boils down to an ethical and political paradox. On the one hand, hospitality requires absolute openness to the other by inviting him or her into your home, come what may. On the other hand, to so much as have a home requires one to control entry to other people, unannounced guests very much included. Hence the paradox: hospitality requires both complete openness and controlled borders and thresholds.

The subtleties of Derrida’s argument do not concern us here. What does, however, is his unexamined assumption that the only genuine motivation to extend hospitality lies in the ethical responsibility to care for the other—along with the capital O Other, given his debt to Emmanuel Levinas—in light of the paradox of hospitality (2000, 25). Derrida gives the ethical motivation to hospitality a kind of hyperbolic precision, but he is by no means an outlier in the field. Indeed, he is perfectly conventional in anchoring the offer of hospitality in care and concern for others, as do several other leading scholars of hospitality (Ben Jelloun Reference Tahar1999; Germann Molz and Gibson Reference Molz and Gibson2007; Gotman Reference Gotman2001; Le Blanc Reference Le Blanc2011; Le Blanc and Brugère Reference Le Blanc and Brugère2017; Lynch et al. Reference Lynch, Molz, Mcintosh, Lugosi and Lashley2011; Lynch, Morrison, and Lashley Reference Morrison and Lashley2007; Rosello Reference Rosello2001; Schérer Reference Schérer2005).

Our claim, then, is that Derrida is a touchstone in hospitality scholarship less because of his originality or radicalism, and more because his theory reproduces an ethical and psychological orthodoxy. Given that it is the norm in hospitality studies, we will not spend more time describing this motivation. That should not, however, be taken to imply that we mean to diminish its value or relevance. Care for other people may not be the only effective motivation for hospitality, but it is essential and irreducible.

In our interviews with French hosts, it was abundantly clear just how important and prevalent care for others is. An excellent example can be found in the comments of Jeanne (interviewee names have been changed to preserve anonymity). She is a thirty-something Parisian who, with her partner, had since 2017 hosted an undocumented Chadian migrant in their home. Her explanation as to why she did so is a powerful and crystal clear statement of care for the other: “[We’ve] chosen to disobey the law because it has become intolerable for us to continue to close our eyes or put blinders on regarding the situation of these migrants … at a time when a large part of the population lives in great precariousness, when in front of us there’s this person who is hungry and thirsty … . For us it was necessary to act” (interview, July 28, 2018). Similarly, other-oriented impulses for hospitality were relayed by Sylvain, a father of two who facilitated the crossing of undocumented Syrians into France: “For my part, I wasn’t guided by the ultimate goal of ‘disobedience.’ Helping first and foremost was an act of humanity. They [the family he hosted, having fled Syria] were at risk of death, that’s when I made the decision to drive from Italy to Greece. It was an urgent situation, an urgent need” (interview, July 17, 2018).

The immediacy of these citizens’ confrontation with another person’s vulnerability and precarity is what compels them into action and offer hospitality. Regardless of the ordeal that has driven undocumented migrants to flee their homes, the fact that they lack basic necessities that the French hosts enjoy—security, shelter, and sustenance—creates a context that, for these hosts, is morally inadmissible and intolerable. The hospitality they offer is driven, in part, by a felt need to help these people.

Care for the World

Care for other people is not a surprising explanation for why citizens host vulnerable migrants. The next two categories of care, by contrast, are: care for the world and care of the self. In our interviews, it was remarkable how often hosts conveyed reasons for their own provision of hospitality that had little to do with helping other people or alleviating their suffering. The remainder of this article is dedicated to these two types of care. Our goal, once again, is not to downplay the importance of care for others or the ethical relationship it establishes, but to render a multifaceted account of alternative motivations that underlie the practice of hospitality.

“Care for the world” is a term often associated with the political thought of Hannah Arendt. Indeed, The Human Condition was initially titled “Amor mundi.” With this idea she refers to an investment in a world, taken primarily in the sense of the background social and political institutions and the principles which people live by. As Ella Myers puts this perspective in her excellent study of “worldly” ethics—that is, ethics oriented by care and concern for a shared world—“the recipient of care is not another person or even persons, but the world, understood as the array of material and immaterial conditions under which human beings live: both with one another and with a rich variety of nonhumans, organic, and technological” (2013, 86). To be clear, when we speak of “caring for the world”, the “world” in the Arendtian sense we accord it, should not be taken to mean the terrestrial “globe” or the “whole wide world” (though it could, of course, mean this in certain contexts, such as climate activism). Rather, we refer to the meaningful space of action that emerges as a result of human inter-relations and shared conditions of existence. Care for the world signifies the collaborative thoughts, words, and deeds expended by people, whether individually or in concert, for the purpose of supporting and sustaining the principles and institutions that constitute a social and political world.

How does “care for the world” translate into the conceptualization and practice of hospitality? Any answer to this question will necessarily be contextual. Social and political worlds are, after all, historically generated and situated. Within a religious context, for example, hospitality could be practiced in order to uphold sacred commandments or the principles and institutions of a Church (see Akins Reference Akins2004; Reaves Reference Reaves2016). Within the French context that we investigated, the world the French hosts sought to vindicate was France itself, or more specifically, its republican political tradition, as underpinned by ideals of freedom, equality, and especially, fraternity (see Ozouf Reference Ozouf, Furet and Ozouf1989, 1998 on fraternity in the French republican tradition). We can trace the birth of these ideals to the late eighteenth-century revolutionary moment and the struggles that ensued. And while our aim here does not require us to revisit this history in any great depth, the significance of fraternity for realizing a French version of republicanism is a crucial piece of the puzzle to explain why our dissident hosts practiced hospitality as “care for the world”.

The French state’s conception of republican government and citizenship is unique. According to its constitution, the French nation is “one and indivisible” in the sense of composing a common body of citizens defined in terms of universalism, civic virtue, and active participation in public affairs. Its self-understanding is distinctly as a political nation: a community of equal citizens who lay claim to a civic rather than ethnic mode of national identity. Negotiating this experience of the political integration of plurality bears out in offers of equal membership, freedom, and fraternity (solidarity) to all those who express willingness to belong to the French nation (see Balibar Reference Balibar2015; Bowen Reference Bowen2007; Reference Bowen2017; Schnapper Reference Schnapper1998; Wallach Scott Reference Scott2007).

Very early in its history (1792, to be precise), the French Republic announced a principle of universal welcome by inviting and extending citizenship to outsiders (that is, to foreigners) who supported its revolutionary, republican creed. Better known as “public hospitality” (Fassin, Morice, and Quimal Reference Fassin, Morice and Quimal1997; Wahnich Reference Wahnich1997), this early practice of cross-bordered openness became a key component of France’s brand of citizenship and identity: the incorporation of outsiders into its community. Since then, and on the strength of its founding principles of freedom, equality, and especially fraternity, the notion of “la France hospitalière” has cemented its hold as a narrative revered by its citizens (Ben Jelloun Reference Tahar1999; Scullion Reference Scullion1995). It expresses the ideal of France as a land of asylum and hospitality, and more recently, as the home of human rights.

With this brief summary of France’s republicanism in place, we can now see why its citizens believe that their country is today betraying its core values. First and foremost, and for all of the state’s rhetoric as a place of welcome, fraternity, and equality, the French hosts we interviewed consider its practice of excluding, rejecting, and neglecting vulnerable migrants to be anything but.

We begin with Loïc, a French citizen who lives in Calais, which in 2018 was the epicenter of the migration crisis in France. He stated that dissident hosts act from a deep sense of “what we feel is right” (interview, July 29, 2018). Indeed, he could not be more explicit about how he acts in order to salvage French republican values: “I hope that one day others will look back at what I, and Cédric [Herrou], and others have done—which is to try and give back France some of her honor.” Similar sentiments can be found in a 2009 news article about Kamel (last name not supplied), the director of a homeless shelter in Marseilles, who denounced the pressure and intimidation by the French police when he refused to comply with their request for a list of names of “foreign-sounding” persons at his shelter. “This is a grave attack,” he told us, “on our humanitarian association’s sacred principle—one publicly proclaimed by the President of the Republic—‘universal welcome [accueil]’)” (Emmaüs France Reference France2009). Of course, such statements express moral indignation toward the state’s treatment of vulnerable people. However, they are also condemnations of a Republic that, in word but not in deed, claims to uphold the value of fraternity and welcome.

Such sentiments were widespread among the hosts we interviewed. Consider Héloïse, a young Parisian activist and president of an association that aids asylum seekers, predominantly the undocumented. Her reaction to France’s “politics of inhospitality” on the question of migrants was unmistakable anger (interview, August 6, 2018). She was furious that in betraying its political ideals and “forcing” citizens like her to “do its caring work”, the state tactically—and tacitly—obliged its citizens to uphold principles that it had all but abandoned. “It is a sorry kind of state,” she continues, “that no longer represents its values but keeps insisting that it does. And when that happens, it can no longer legitimately represent us. A state that acts illegitimately makes our acts all the more legitimate and necessary so we can bring about change.”

Several hosts denounced the criminalization of hospitality as displaying the hallmarks of a period in history marked by racial and religious hatred and intolerance. Virginie, a dyed-in-the-wool activist living in Paris, was dismayed at being subjected to a “messy situation combining racist ideology with a nationalist electorate” that was gathering momentum on “their watch, in their country” (interview, August 6, 2018). Adèle, a researcher living in Paris with her husband and young children, stated unequivocally that “France continues to trash her values” (interview, August 12, 2018). Morgane, a journalist who offered accommodation to asylum seekers in her modest flat in Marseilles, explained that what moved her to help these people was a deep-seated fear of the similarities between today’s racially inflected policing of migrants and the horrors of the Second World War. With three young children of mixed ethnicity, Morgane was deeply wary of the present situation and where it may lead: “Today everything’s fine, but tomorrow, what might happen? What if the conflation [l’amalgame] we see today where migrants are all Muslims and all Muslims terrorists, unleashes a situation very similar to the ‘[19]40s? We act like nothing’s wrong, but it’s there—ticking away in the background and that’s what pushes me [to help]” (interview, August 1, 2018). Hosting foreigners in need as they journey to an imagined safe haven is one way to take a stand and “resist the hostile treatment of ‘undesirables [malvenus]’, who, politely, we call ‘migrants from the South’” (ibid.). Here again, while care for vulnerable others is present, it is alloyed with a distinctive desire to right a social and political world that is failing itself. Hospitality offers these hosts an opportunity to take a brave and meaningful step in the right direction. Loïc summed up the indignation and betrayal felt by so many of the hosts we spoke with about their country. He said their goal was to challenge what is seen as an increasingly “xenophobic and racist France” (interview July 29, 2018).

In hearing their stories, it became clear to us that the French hosts were speaking from the vantage of a citizenly vigilance to prevent their country—their “world” in Arendt’s sense of the term—from continuing down a dangerous and ignoble path. Seen in this light, the motivation for hospitality does not precisely map on to the desire and imperative to help or save undocumented migrants (that is, to care for vulnerable other people). The hosts felt anger, sadness and shame that their country was failing on numerous fronts. Hospitality, we discovered, was a way to save what several hosts repeatedly and scathingly referred to as their own “shitty country [pays merdique]” (interview with Héloïse, August 6, 2018, interview with Sylvain, July 31, 2018, and interview with Loïc, July 29, 2018).

That is their criticism. What steps did they take to actualize the ethic of the Republic and fraternity? They invested as citizens in public affairs. The hosts contested the precarious standing of the undocumented in their community as active citizens of the French Republic. To this end, the movement’s figurehead, Cédric Herrou, stated at his High Court hearing, “Let it be known, Honorable Prosecutor, that I will continue to remain faithful to my convictions, and that my France, our France, will continue to defend the rights of the men, women, and children present on French soil in the name of the founding values of the French Republic” (Flandrin Reference Flandrin2017). With these words, and backed by his hospitable deeds, Herrou proclaimed his own identity and ethos as threatened “objects of shared attention and concern”—worldly things, to recall Myers’s term (2013, 86)—that must be honored at “home”. The French State, he claimed, was betraying the French Republic, and it was up to engaged citizens to remind France of its roots. That is why he and others imagine and propose what a republican citizenship that values fraternity and equality should look like.

Now, it may sound odd to use Arendt’s concept of “care for the world” to represent how and why French citizen activists seek to redeem their country’s political tradition. After all, in a famous exchange of letters with Gershom Scholem—the eminent Jewish scholar, who, in the wake of Arendt’s controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem, reproached her for a lack of love of the Jewish people (Arendt and Scholem 2017, 202)—she explicitly contrasts love for the world with love for “some nation or collective,” whether that be German, French, American, or Israeli (Arendt and Scholem 2017, 206). Yet it is important to clarify that the real object of her criticism is not love of country or a people per se, but a spurious kind of love, better termed self-satisfied loyalty, that a country or a people feels for itself. That is precisely what the hosts do not share: their dedication to a set of national principles (that is, to French republicanism) is intended as a rebuke to the current state of affairs, and in particular, to the hypocrisy and complacency of a government that gives lip-service to hallowed political principles so as to keep them at safe distance. Their patriotism is, in short, anchored in opposition and critique of their own country. For that reason, we invoke Arendt’s conception of care for the world—amor mundi—to characterize the link our hosts draw between their practice of hospitality and the French tradition of republicanism: it is care directed not primarily to other people but to a shared object that is both common and contested.

To conclude, the point we emphasize is that several of the hosts we spoke with conceive of and engage in this kind of activity—political acts of hospitality—in order to realize the kind of (French) citizen they aspire to be and the kind of (French) society they hope to live in. Offering hospitality in conditions of disobedience is how they “care for the world.” In challenging the perceived inhospitality of the French state and its attempt to define citizenship and republican identity in an exclusive and nativist way, hosts such as Herrou make clear they are not prepared to allow their country to continue down an unworthy and intolerant path. What motivates the hospitality they offered is thus connected with, but cannot be reduced to, a desire to help vulnerable others. Hospitality is the specific terrain upon which citizens hold the state to account by reclaiming their own national and political identity. For that reason, a desire to care for the world is crucial to helping us to understand these acts of hospitality.

Care of the Self

In this section we consider the third—and on first impression, most counter-intuitive—motivation for hospitality articulated by the French hosts we interviewed: care of the self. In the same way that care for the world is associated with a particular thinker (that is, Hannah Arendt), we observe that “care of the self” is the key concept of Michel Foucault’s later work (1985; 1986; 1997a, b, c, d; 2005; 2010; 2011). His guiding thought is this: the ancient world (specifically, Greek, Roman, and early Christianity) had a valuable and unique conception of morality that is in danger of fading out of sight today. Why? Because, to speak at a very general level, Foucault believes that today our common-sense understanding of what constitutes morality is dominated by the idea of prescriptive rules. Whether due to the influence of later Christianity, Kantianism, Utilitarianism, or the whole set of normalizing human and medical sciences of the modern age that Foucault dissected earlier on in his career, morality tends to be seen as a list of dos and don’ts. We live at a time, he says, that “sees in external laws the basis for morality,” such that acting morally amounts to following “the rules for acceptable behavior in relation to others” (1997c, 228).

The ancient world, by contrast, was very different. On Foucault’s account, there the motivation behind morality was not seen in terms of rule following, or even good behavior towards others, but in leading a certain kind of life that was held to be free, noble, and beautiful. According to the ancients, one is not moral because someone or some rule tells you to be. Nor is one moral for the sake of other people. Rather, one is moral for one’s own sake. “What we have there,” he observes, “is an entire ethics that is pivoted on the care of the self and that gave ancient ethics its particular form. I am not saying that ethics is the care of the self, but that, in antiquity, ethics as the conscious practice of freedom has revolved around this fundamental imperative: Take care of yourself [soucie-toi de toi-même]” (1997a, 285). And although care of the self is characteristic of ancient times, it is by no means limited to it, and occasionally in his work Foucault points to modern and contemporary renewals and extensions of it (for example, 1997d; 2005, 251-52).

This is not the place to detail Foucault’s conception of care of the self (see Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre2018). It is important, however, to list its three most characteristic features. Taken together, they make the care of the self a distinctive (and for Foucault, valuable and instructive) conception of morality. First, the purpose of care of the self is to transform the self, which is why Foucault repeatedly calls it a “poetics” and “cultivation” of the self (1986, 37-68). From this perspective, the aim of morality is first and foremost to transform oneself into a different—and according to the ancients, better, wiser, and more tranquil—person. Second, the object of this morality is the self, not other people. Caring for other people may be a happy side-effect of care of the self—and, on Foucault’s account, it always is, given that egoism and selfishness are poor ways to live (see here the thinker who inspired Foucault’s later work, Hadot Reference Hadot1995)—but the primary object of this morality is the self and improving oneself (2005, 177). Third, and summing up, care of the self is voluntary: one undertakes it not because of some imperative or command, but in order to ameliorate and improve one’s own self (2005, 317). Foucault was especially firm on this last point given how he wanted to distinguish ancient morality and care of the self from the prescriptive moralities of the modern period. Caring for oneself, he insists, “is a choice about existence made by the individual. People decide for themselves whether or not to care for themselves” (1997b, 271).

Equipped with this overview of the care of the self, let us return to our hosts. As we saw in the previous section, several practice hospitality in order to care for the world (which in their case means French republicanism and its ideals of equality and fraternity). Other hosts, however, and even some of same hosts at different moments in our interviews, described their motivations differently. They spoke of hospitality in terms of a practice used to craft themselves, at an ethical and personal level, and to cope with a world that had come to signify alienation, disillusionment, chaos, and duplicity. In this section, we return to Loïc, Adèle, and Virginie to present three axes along which care of the self is practiced in and through hospitality. Although a minority among the hosts we interviewed, these cases are significant in that they disclose a new and distinctive type of motivation behind hospitality. More pointedly, they reveal a dimension of hospitality that is not only unrecognized in the literature but, in a real sense, inconceivable to it given how centered it is on care for others. For that reason, we spend comparatively more time reconstructing the contexts these hosts operate in. As we will see, the explanations they give for their own acts of hospitality track very closely to Foucault’s three characteristic features of the care of the self.

We begin with Loïc. He works and lives in Calais, known as the site of the infamous “Jungle”, one of Europe’s largest makeshift refugee camps. The atmosphere is marked by conflict and discontent. On the one hand, a majority of residents and local authorities in Calais deplore the presence of undocumented in their midst (Mohdin Reference Mohdin2019). On the other hand, a minority eagerly supports the migrants through great and small acts of assistance. They do so in the face of potential arrest and public stigmatization, as was the fate of local migrant support group (Terre d’Errance) volunteer Monique Pouille, charged and detained for the “crime” of charging the phones of the undocumented she cares for (Allsopp Reference Allsopp2012). Despite these risks, Loïc helps out daily in the Jungle. With the exception of one or two agencies, however, he refuses to work with the established aid channels. He distrusts the multitude of associations that descend upon Calais from outside the region. Rarely do the humanitarian workers stay longer than a few weeks, yet that is time enough for tensions to flare between their more established and recognized ways of providing help, and ad-hoc, impromptu or less formal gestures of care, such as those afforded by Loïc.

The kinds of hospitality Loïc offers undocumented migrants may seem mundane. He helps out with paperwork and invites them back to his home so that they can shower, wash their clothes, charge their phone, eat a meal, and rest up. He ferries them back and forth from the Jungle in his truck in the quiet of the night or early morning to avoid detection. He receives no financial support to offset the costs of helping and refuses it to stave off rumors of “people saying afterwards that I use the money for other things.” What Loïc hints at here is his concern and disgust that humanitarian organizations and outsider volunteers in the area have made the assistance of migrants all too transactional, in the sense of trading aid for money, labor, or even illicit goods and favors. As he puts it, “there’s just too much business [he uses the English word] going on. It’s not my thing, not my idea of what helping means … That’s why I prefer not to work with the NGOs—I just act alone. I take my two boys with me and we head off for the camps.” In discussing the nature of this “business” Loïc barely conceals his dismay at the actions of many non-for-profit organizations. “From my experience on the ground,” he says, “many [workers and organizations] aren’t even concerned to help migrants move out of the Jungle and find a better situation elsewhere. Why would they? That’s their sole purpose for existing!” Equally distressing for Loïc is that numerous humanitarian volunteers are known to abuse the power they hold over vulnerable migrants by trading sexual favors for assistance. This state of affairs is shameful for Loïc. “I’m ashamed,” he confesses. “Frankly, there’s a moment where you just go ‘we’re ashamed to be French’… The principles of liberté, égalité, and fraternité don’t mean much anymore. For a long time now in France they’ve no longer had any value. Not for the state. That’s just some kind of sign they’ve put up for themselves [une enseigne qu’ils se sont mis] on our buildings. But they mean something to me. Liberté, égalité, and fraternité: they’ve become my own personal values: they no longer belong to France” (interview, July 29, 2018).

Loïc’s use of the word “personal” is telling. Confronted by a blatant disregard of these principles by the state and certain sectors of the humanitarian milieu, he expresses his need and desire to live in a more coherent, meaningful, and integral way. Just listen to the intonations of his voice: “they mean something to me.” Faced with the cynicism of a state that claims to espouse republican principles, he believes these principles will and must start with him. This is more than care for a world. It is better likened to care of the self. His choice to be personally—voluntarily, Foucault would say—guided by these principles marks a commitment to work on himself in order to become a certain kind of person, one who embodies liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Loïc, in other words, is motivated by the humanitarian situation in Calais to craft a self that can better contend with the shame, suspicion and existential alienation he feels in his milieu.

At the heart of Loïc’s ethos is a stance of refusal. He refuses to play along as the citizen of a state for whom liberté, égalité, and fraternité are only notionally proclaimed, quite like “some kind of sign to put up on buildings.” Read in this light, his hospitable and humanitarian acts are practices to craft the self. To reach back to Foucault, recall that care of the self involves self-transformation, voluntarily undertaken for the sake of one’s own self. Loïc meets the criteria to the letter. He sees himself as a free and independent agent who practices hospitality to reclaim his personal national, civic, and ethical identity. Rather than lead to any kind of individualism or retreat into private life, caring for the self in Loïc’s case involves a passionate and publicly minded engagement. His goal is to accept and uphold a certain ideal of the person and citizen, and in acting from its principles, to realize this ideal in his person and being. Of course, Loïc is just one person, and we do not mean to generalize his point of view to other hosts (whether in our study or beyond). Yet in his words a new spectrum of motivations and justifications for the provision of hospitality comes to light.

The second host we discuss in connection with care of the self is Adèle, the Parisian researcher and mother of two introduced earlier. Self-described as a “born and bred law-abiding, tax-paying, ‘model’ citizen,” she had only recently begun to host migrants and thus practice civil disobedience. The explanation she gives for her hospitality is rooted in a belief that her actions are legitimate because “what the state is doing is basically disassociating itself from its own values.” Adèle described this disassociation in terms of “words and deeds.” As with Loïc and several other hosts, she observed that the French state falsely and self-servingly espouses the values of liberté, égalité, and fraternité:

Adèle’s explanation is clear. In part, her words come from someone who commits criminal acts of hospitality to hold the state to account and in order to care for her world. Yet her strongest motivation is inward-looking and concerns the relation she has to herself. Hosting migrants—which she does by coordinating soup kitchens and providing accommodation in her home—is how she actualizes principles that are essential to her self-conception. They are essential to her being and living in the world because “growing up” she was taught to abide by them. They are, she emphasizes, how she “identifies and defines” herself.

Consider the deep anxiety expressed in Adèle’s suspicion that the French principles she holds dear have become mere hollow signifiers. “Words seem to have lost all meaning” she says. “They [politicians] say what they want, they engage in constant double-speak but their actions betray them—their words ring empty. If I’m to continue to believe in [those] three words, all I can do is act.” Here we are reminded of her earlier claim that France is “trashing,” and thus separating itself from, its own values. As the great French philosopher Henri Bergson said long ago in connection to how nation-states talk about fraternity, “we must not listen too much to what it says, we must look at what it does” (1977, 31). That is what Adèle does. Sadly, it becomes clear to her that the values the state lays claim to are, in her time and place, just so much talk. The dissociation she observes is not just between words and deeds, but also between state and citizens. That is what to her, as a republican, has become intolerable. The separation of word from meaning undermines the foundation of how she defines herself not just as a citizen but as a person, full stop.

What is Adèle’s response to this existential predicament? “If I’m to continue to believe in [those] three words, all I can do is act.” And if her actions have the effect of helping others, it is clear in the wider context of her remarks that she also strives to alleviate the anxiety, chaos and self-confusion that she experiences from her country’s betrayal of its core values. Her practice of hospitality is thus partly therapeutic, and its effects are psychological and existential. It is what Foucault would call a technique of the self, defined as “the reflective and voluntary practices by which men [and women] not only set themselves rules of conduct, but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being” (1985, 10-11).

Finally, we come to Virginie. A filmmaker by trade, she has for years been involved in activism to denounce the treatment and rights of asylum seekers and migrants. Several years ago, she set up a “Solidarity Collective” in her city, dedicated to what she calls “occupations of public space,” which seek to hinder forced deportations of asylum seekers. In that role, she also coordinated public relations campaigns that took aim at the state and its institutions.

Things began to sour for Virginie early in 2018 with the realization that her unrelenting and exhausting efforts to get the state to amend its inhospitable practices and attitudes were going nowhere. In her interview, she voiced an overwhelming sense of disillusionment, even cynicism. No doubt, this sentiment is tied to the futility of trying to bring government officials into dialogue with local residents to ameliorate living conditions for undocumented migrants. “Politically speaking,” she said, “it has been a complete failure.” She also expressed disenchantment with how things have played out in the solidarity movement. But what we wish to highlight is a third reason for her disillusionment. Asked why France continues to criminalize solidarity, her immediate response was to contrast the high-profile status of the hosts with the relative invisibility of the migrants:

These are difficult remarks and we need to tread carefully. Virginie’s complaint is not that white hosts and activists are in it for some kind of self-gratification. Nor is she exactly condemning the French media’s focus on the hosts. Her main criticism, we take it, is directed at the fact that while afforded the chance of being able to work within the system, relatively privileged white citizen-hosts appear not to challenge the power structures that remain slanted towards themselves. Airing and giving precedence to their stories of hardship and arrest contributes to the erasure of the migrants’ own.

It is well known in the scholarly literature that well-intentioned citizens in solidaristic activities operate within a system that affords them a measure of voice and visibility that, at the same time, denies that voice and visibility to the undocumented (see, e.g., Calhoun Reference Calhoun2004, Chouliaraki Reference Chouliaraki2006, Malkki Reference Malkki1996, Telesca Reference Telesca2013, Zelizer Reference Zelizer2001). But Virginie alerts us to a problem of a different order, namely that the self-constitution of the citizen-hosts’ political subjectivities comes at the expense of affording undocumented migrants a political subjectivity of their own. Virginie made this discovery while reflecting on her involvement and identity in the solidarity-activist movement. And this, we take it, goes to the heart of her exasperation and disillusionment. This solidarity milieu produces an ethical and political situation that doesn’t sit well with her way of being in the world. For crucially, Virginie considers herself a champion of the principle of equality. “Equality,” she states, “isn’t a goal we need to reach, it’s the place where we need to start … The question [of why I help] is really, ‘what kind of country do I want to live in?’ I have a responsibility because I’m from here, and therefore I hold certain values. When I’m told ‘I help people’, I say to them ‘no, not at all. I’m not helping people; I’m defending my values’. [Helping] isn’t for others, it’s also for oneself.”

This last line sums up the central point of this section: the disregard of values considered foundational to both state and citizen can undermine one’s own self-conception not simply as a citizen but as a serious responsible person. Virginie is explicit, indeed emphatic that while her offers of hospitality may well have wider political effects, and while she certainly wants to help vulnerable people, her actions are avowedly undertaken for her own sake, to be able to stake, claim, and live a set of values that are core to her citizenly and personal integrity. Ongoing involvement in a system that reproduces white-privilege and inequity is untenable because, among many other things, it is detrimental to her conception of herself. Just as we heard Adèle say, without a real and lived commitment to these values, Virginie feels lost: either confused as to what her real values are, or else a hypocrite in the face of them. To be clear, despite this orientation to address and care for the relation she has to herself, Virginie does not shun political engagement or withdraw into herself. She throws in completely, assisting migrants with their asylum claims, finding temporary accommodation, signing them up for language classes, and locating family members. Our claim is that these acts of helping and hospitality should be viewed as techniques of the self that are consciously practiced to ameliorate one’s own way of being in the world. That, at any rate, is the interpretation Virginie gives to it. Just like Loïc and Adèle, her need to care for herself is a reaction to the disillusionment she experiences in the solidarity-activist milieu. From this perspective, her hospitable practices are not primarily in service of a public and political movement. She opens her door, rather, in order to better live the life of her own choosing. Hospitality is how she “defends her values,” and defending these values, she makes clear, is the only way to “help oneself” in a world that has come to signify disillusionment and chaos. The ethics of the ancient world that Foucault surveys may seem distant from the social, political, economic, humanitarian, and moral horizons that Virginie contends with. But there is a shared orientation here: hospitality, for her, is in service of personal transformation and is voluntarily undertaken with that goal in mind. With Virginie, as with Loïc and Adèle, all three criteria for care of the self are met.