Carte de Séjour: beginnings and intentions

Carte de Séjour were formed in Lyon in 1981, under the leadership of Rachid Taha, who acted as lyricist, singer, percussionist and spokesman for the band. Taha joined two brothers of Moroccan descent, Mohammed (sometimes spelt Mohamad) Amini on rhythm guitar and Mokhtar on bass. With the subsequent addition of Jérôme Savy on lead guitar (briefly preceded by Eric Vaquer), Brahim M'Sahel on the derbouki, bendir and congas, and the female backing singers Souad Amidou and Najette, the band started to tour the Lyon area, recording their first maxi-single, Zoubida, in 1982. Other musicians later joined them, including Germain Troudard on the drums (replaced by Djamel Dif, then Pascal Noguera), Jallal on the oud and banjo (followed by Nabil Ibn'Khalidi), sound engineer Mark Frank on synthesisers and, from 1986, Julien Weiss on the Middle-Eastern sitar known as the qanun. The names of the musicians and instruments reflect the group's ethnic diversity and musical eclecticism. Band members of Maghrebi origin (Taha, the Amini brothers, the vocalists) played alongside those with Christian French backgrounds (Savy, Vaquer, Weiss), while the electric guitar, bass and drums established a core rock sound that was ‘orientalised’ by the use of the oud, North African percussions and the qanun. Intercultural exchange also characterised their production, with the Algerian-born Taha bringing his passion for Afro-American music, and the Paris-born Muslim convert Weiss his expertise in classical Arab music (Asmar Reference Asmar2001).

Such ethnic and cultural cross-fertilisation (the French use the term métissage) was deemed innovative in the soundscape of early 1980s France, at a time when critics bemoaned the ‘monocultural’ trend in French popular music (Yonnet Reference Yonnet1985, p. 193). With their ‘Arabe et rock’ sound, Carte de Séjour were initially welcomed as a band that refreshed and expanded the scope of French rock music (Conrath Reference Conrath1986, writing for Libération). On account of this hybridity, the group have been frequently referenced by academics who discuss the emergence of the first beur generation of the 1980s (e.g. Taïeb Reference Taïeb1998; Breatnach and Sterenfeld Reference Breatnach, Sterenfeld, Kidd and Reynolds2000; Howarth and Varouxakis Reference Howarth and Varouxakis2003; Huq Reference Huq2006). Nonetheless, esteem in some quarters has never guaranteed widespread or long-lasting success. In fact, and this is what all existing accounts of Carte de Séjour fail to mention, the group never made it big in France, and their split in 1989, after only two albums, went largely unnoticed. Their vinyls were never re-issued on CD, a clear sign of their poor market appeal.Footnote ² Even ‘Douce France’, the group's best known record, sold poorly, was boycotted by radio stations and, as we shall see, was generally unrepresentative of the group's overall music style. To a large extent then, Carte de Séjour remain a misunderstood one-hit wonder, whose actually rather modest career contrasts with the widespread use of their name when looking to illustrate successful integration and radical politics. To explain this confused legacy, and to understand what makes or blocks the musical career of French Maghrebis, we will first examine the use of ‘Arab’ features in the group's music and performance.

The ‘Arab’: France's perfect rebel?

Contrary to widely held views, Carte de Séjour's Arab-influenced rock music was far from being a straightforward celebration of the possibility of ethnic hybridity in French culture. In fact, their music and in particular Taha's performance parodied stereotypical representations of ‘Arabness’ (held both by the French and by ‘Arabs’ themselves), in a doubly provocative manner that was often misunderstood by, and antagonistic to, France's mainstream public and ethnic minorities in equal measure. Carte de Séjour was Taha's brainchild, and the group's complex portrayal of an ‘Arab’ identity can be related to elements of his personal experience – as he is keen to explain in his autobiography, published in 2008. Born in 1958 in Oran, Algeria, Taha moved to Alsace aged 10 and grew up as an Algerian teenager in 1970s France. He felt torn between two cultures and found life in France generally ‘sombre, triste, hostile’ [‘dark, sad, hostile’] (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 48). Moving to Lyon in 1977, Taha (Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 56) became ‘obsessed’ with his own sense of ethnic difference from the white majority, and developed a specific understanding of (ethnic) identity that would inform his stage persona later on.

Indeed, working as a door-to-door salesman for a while, and being totally fluent in French, Taha (Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 76) found that his customers were more receptive if he pretended to be a recently arrived immigrant, speaking in a ‘foreign-sounding’ French accent. Allowing his presumed ‘Arabness’ to be heard as well as seen, Taha built a seemingly coherent immigré persona which, for all its implied inferiority in being unable to speak French ‘properly’, appeared less threatening to the French. In his autobiography, Taha (Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 76) gleefully recalls performing ‘un véritable numéro de music-hall’ [‘a real music hall performance’] when perfecting the French version of an ‘Arabic’ accent, and the analogy with the music hall is key for understanding his stage choices as a rock artist a few years later. This experience revealed to him that identity (‘Arabness’ in this case) was essentially performative, that it could be emphasised or subdued at will, even created from scratch, and that performing a role could be a lot of fun. Taha (Reference Taha and Lacout2008, pp. 76–7) really dwells on the pleasure of lying in this passage of his autobiography, recalling that, depending on his customers, he would also pass for a harki (Algerian ‘collaborator’ to the French cause) or a pied-noir (European settler in Algeria), able to put on a white working-class, ‘titi parisien’ accent if required. Without wanting to read too much into a single anecdote, this experience and its retrospective narration indicate Taha's strong taste for theatricality, and his equally strong anti-essentialist understanding of ethnic identity. In Carte de Séjour, Taha's dedication to identity politics was similarly coated in playfulness and derision, so that the group's musical identity is best understood as the unusual juxtaposition of an ad hoc commitment to some political issues, and the mocking of a string of orthodoxies affecting politics and music alike, including the orthodoxy of political commitment within rock culture.

To start with, Taha was genuinely angered by France's migration policy, and the spread of anti-Maghrebi discrimination at the turn of the 1980s spurred the group into existence. Following the oil crisis, new legislation on migration had been introduced in France in 1977 which no longer guaranteed the renewal of residency permits for migrants, and authorised arbitrary deportations that especially targeted North Africans (Hargreaves Reference Hargreaves2007). Anti-Arab sentiment also grew in this period as the National Front (Front National, FN) presented France's rising unemployment as a consequence of mismanaged immigration. In the mainstream media, Maghrebis also tended increasingly to be represented as lazy, sly and potentially violent (Rosello Reference Rosello1998; Gastaut Reference Gastaut2000, p. 109). When the group started rehearsing together in 1980, Taha chose the name ‘Carte de Séjour’ (meaning ‘residency permit’) as an ironic commentary on racist anxieties, suggesting that the visibly ‘foreign’ artists among the group – including, obviously, Taha himself – were non-integrated foreigners needing to be officially defined and controlled by the state. More generally, Taha aimed, with his group, to challenge the presence of ‘fascism and intolerance’ in France (in Caubet Reference Caubet2004, p. 114) using irony as his strategy by borrowing, for instance, a phrase from the administrative jargon that identified a reality he despised.

Political concerns were central to the group's identity, then, but their commitment was never absolute or simple. Mockery and self-mockery were also part of their stage act, including when representing ‘Arabness’. For instance, Taha toyed with the stereotype of the ‘Arab’ as non-integrated by choosing to sing exclusively in Arabic. In France, the French language is a central marker of national identity, as attested by years of centralising linguistic policy (Ager Reference Ager1999, p. 11), and speaking French is expected of all citizens, including those of foreign extraction. Taha, who is bilingual in French and Arabic, would first compose his lyrics in French for Carte de Séjour, but translate them into Arabic afterwards, and he sang in that language only (Caubet Reference Caubet2004, p. 211). Apart from ‘Douce France’, borrowed from the repertoire of chanson, Carte de Séjour's songs were all sung in the Algerian dialect known as darja, a language that contains a sizeable proportion of French vocabulary and thus typifies the diglossia widespread among North African speakers (Meouak and Aguadé Reference Meouak and Aguadé1996, p. 160), but remains a local form of Arabic nonetheless. Thus, a few French expressions could be heard in Carte de Séjour's songs, notably in the choruses and the songs' titles (e.g. ‘Désolé’ and ‘Mirage’, both 1984; ‘Parfum’, 1986), but their lyrics were actually in Arabic, and printed in Arabic script in the inside sleeve of their first album, Rhorhomanie (1984). Deliberately choosing Arabic over French, Taha constructed an audible and unavoidable ‘Arabness’ for Carte de Séjour, which confused the public.Footnote ³ His use of Arabic was meant as an act of defiance against both anti-Arab prejudice and the concept of republican integration, yet it reinstituted the colonialist vision of the ‘Arab’ as unable to speak French and adapt, as such fundamentally incompatible with French culture.Footnote ⁴ Unfortunately, then, his irony seems to have been lost on contemporary audiences (see below), and his sophisticated linguistic strategy also backfired in that his lyrics were practically impossible to understand for the majority of French who do not speak Arabic.

Carte de Séjour's ethnic identity was further complexified by the superposition, in their music, lyrics, use of cultural references and vocal delivery, of both positive and negative ‘Arab’ elements. For instance, the group paid homage to the Egyptian guitarist Farid Al-Atrash, echoing his style of playing on several songs, and dedicated a song to the Algerian singer Cheikha Rimitti. They also included North African percussions in all their songs and Taha obviously sang in Arabic. Yet, alongside this deployment and enjoyment of ‘Arab’ features, the group challenged aspects of the Maghrebi and émigré culture, including the Muslim practice of forced marriage (denounced in ‘Zoubida’, 1982), and the desire of some beurs to appear more ‘French’ (‘La Moda’, 1982). Above all, Taha demonstrated his refusal to hold ‘Arabness’ sacred in any way by exaggerating his Arabic accent when singing, stressing the pharyngeal consonants of this already guttural language.Footnote ⁵ Western audiences did not really notice the artificiality of his delivery, remarking upon his ‘accent très rugueux’ [‘particularly coarse accent’] (Caubet Reference Caubet2004, p. 214) and ‘lusty growl’ (Rosen Reference Rosen2005), and usually arguing that this ‘clashing, chopping’ sound embodied the anger characteristic of rock music (Conrath Reference Conrath1986). However, native Arabic locutors, interviewed in the 1980s by Paul Moreira (Reference Moreira1987, pp. 36–7), picked up on this distortion. They felt that Taha mistreated the ‘natural’ beauty of Arabic, and despaired at his reproduction of stereotypes of aggressivity through his exaggeratedly throaty delivery.

For Taha, however, forcing his accent was another way to suggest that ethnic generalities, whether positive (Arabic is a beautiful language) or negative (Arabic sounds aggressive), were unwarranted. He might have been a native Arabic speaker, but Taha felt no sense of belonging to a homogeneous cultural ‘community’ and certainly no duty to improve this community's self-image, however much it was mistreated by the white French majority. Playing with social and cultural expectations was, therefore, Carte de Séjour's main tactic to ridicule fixed conceptions of ethnicity and correctness. If we paraphrase Homi Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1984, p. 126), whose notion of mimicry identifies the power of the colonial gaze when depicting a ‘recognisable Other’, we may consider Carte de Séjour as a radical music group who criticised that power, through their parodying of prevalent, white French prejudices concerning the representation of ‘Arabs’. By calling themselves ‘Carte de Séjour’ and by singing in Arabic, they portrayed the ‘Arab’ as an irrevocable Other, thereby mocking (post-)colonial conceptions of the Orient. Yet Carte de Séjour also mocked attitudes presumed to be widespread among the ex-colonised, such as a certain defensiveness. As a result, the group never just debunked the French ethnic majority, but attacked, with a somewhat scatter-gun approach, all feelings of superiority that arose (or were assumed to arise) from being white and French, or Arab and North African.

For Carte de Séjour, then, playing (with) the ‘Arab’ exposed the limitations of considering ethnic identity as stable and stereotypical, and aimed to force both the white majority and French Maghrebis to confront their potentially prejudiced selves. If the group's outward confidence in using Arabic set a precedent within French rock culture, influencing the careers of better known artists such as Mano Negra and Zebda (as noted by Hakem Reference Hakem1999, p. 40; Barbot Reference Barbot2002, p. 31; Howarth and Varouxakis Reference Howarth and Varouxakis2003, p. 150; Caubet Reference Caubet2004, p. 212), their ideological agenda was too destabilising, and often too obscure, for a general audience, and failed to generate the consensus needed for mainstream success. In the following section, we will see how Carte de Séjour's complex depiction of the ‘Arab’ clashed with the straightforward, victimising discourse of the 1980s anti-racist movement, and we will demonstrate that their profound playfulness distanced them from the traditional model of the (French) rocker as ‘earnest’ when politicised.

Rock the Republic

If the group's provocations ironically echoed the FN rhetoric of the ‘Arab’ as undesirable, they also challenged the French republican assumption that all legal migrants, including ‘Arabs’, can shed their ‘difference’ and become unproblematically French. By making their ‘Arabness’ so evident, the group suggested that ‘race’ was inescapable and thus confronted the ideology of French republicanism, which asserts that equality among citizens can only be achieved when the so-called private and public spheres of identity remain separate. In this perspective, the French Republic welcomes immigrants who can keep any expression of cultural and racial ‘difference’ to their private selves. Put differently, race is irrelevant in the recognition of Frenchness. However well intentioned, this official discourse is, unfortunately, mired in contradictions (how can a Black person not be black in public?), and blind to acts of racial discrimination, as Anglo-American scholars working in the field of French Studies have been pointing out for over 15 years (e.g. Silverman Reference Silverman, Hargreaves and Leaman1995; Rosello Reference Rosello1998; Hargreaves Reference Hargreaves2007). Taha, in the Carte de Séjour years and since, has developed his own brand of ‘republicanism bashing’, claiming for instance that republican integration crushes cultural diversity (in Conte 2000, p. 39). He has frequently acknowledged the visibility and social importance of race, observing, for instance, the large proportion of whites in his audience, and criticised the arbitrary yet widespread nature of ethnic prejudice (in Pascaud Reference Pascaud2007, p. 14). The songs of Carte de Séjour explored this theme. ‘Ramsa’ (1986) commented on the anti-Maghrebi attitude of the French police, and ‘Désolé’ (1984) staged the rejection of an Algerian's request for accommodation, despite every evidence of being solvent, hardworking and en règle.Footnote ⁶ Both songs placed the responsibility for lack of integration uniquely, and therefore provocatively, on the French public and authorities.

Carte de Séjour's twin-pronged attack on far-Right extremism and state republicanism was culturally untenable in mid-1980s France because of the consensus emerging at that time among anti-racist campaigners, who also made up the group's main fan base (see Moreira Reference Moreira1987). From 1983–1984 onwards, in the face of a growing FN menace and spurred by the coming of age of the first beur generation, young left-wing activists rallied around an ‘anti-racist’ discourse, most successfully channelled by SOS Racisme. SOS Racisme was an anti-racist organisation founded in 1984 with a view to halting the rise of the FN. Largely uncontroversial, SOS led an effective, showbiz-oriented media campaign that was heavily sponsored by the PS, and accordingly achieved institutional status from 1985 onwards (Fysh Reference Fysh and Mclean1998, p. 203; Gastaut Reference Gastaut2000, p. 185). Because the FN had appropriated the notion of race in political debate, with overtones of segregation, SOS Racisme attempted to uphold anti-racism without any reference to race at all, and suffered as a consequence from a ‘lamentable theoretical confusion’ (Fysh Reference Fysh and Mclean1998, p. 201). Instead, SOS proffered a universalist message of fraternal love between France's white majority and ethnic minorities, a discourse that chimed perfectly with republicanism because of its smoothing over of ethnic distinctions, and which tended to identify ‘Arabs’ as victims of fascist bullying in its anti-FN strategy.

Taha, as we have seen, hated all forms of ethnic reductionism, refusing to consider any group (minority or majority) in anything other than a fragmented, piecemeal fashion. Repeatedly, he scrutinised the ‘negative’ traits of the so-called ‘Arab’ community, exclaiming for instance in interview that ‘Les beaufs arabes, ça existe aussi’ [‘there are right-wing Arabs, too’] (in Moreira Reference Moreira1987, p. 51). On 15 June 1985, Carte de Séjour played live at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, at a large-scale concert attended by the Parisian intelligentsia which officially launched the campaign of SOS Racisme. When, after much conflict with the organisers (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 132), Carte de Séjour were eventually booked, they sang ‘Douce France’, their oriental-style cover of Charles Trenet's classic. Before singing, Taha dedicated the song to ‘les Français racistes [et] les Arabes racists … Hé oui … il n'y a pas que les Français qui sont racistes’ [‘racist French and racist Arabs … oh yes … the French aren't the only ones who are racist’] (quoted in Moreira Reference Moreira1987, p. 31). Although expressing his hatred of racism, in keeping with the gathering's general ethos, his criticism of ‘les Arabes’ could appear to give ammunition to the far Right by discrediting the consensual defence (and definition) of that minority among the Left.

The group therefore stood at odds with the dominant left-wing discourse of the period, and there was certainly no love lost between Taha and SOS. The co-founders of the organisation, Harlem Désir (Reference Désir1985) and Julien Dray (Reference Dray1987), both fail to mention Carte de Séjour in their respective memoirs, despite the fact that SOS owed much of its success to its association with ‘minority’ and beur artists. Even today, Taha remains scathing towards the organisation, claiming that their famous hand-shaped badge was copied from his group's stage prop (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 97), and that the slogan ‘Touche pas à mon pote’ [‘Hands off my mate’] was overly negative (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 132). Crucially, Taha (Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 133) has characterised SOS Racisme's brand of anti-racism as artificial and dishonest, geared towards party-political promotion for the benefit of the PS. If Taha appears, on this issue, more sophisticated than some, in the sense that his views meet those of academic analysts (e.g. Fysh Reference Fysh and Mclean1998; Cusset 2008), his challenging of right-wing conservatism and left-wing dogma in the same breath was detrimental, career-wise, to Carte de Séjour. In fact, given Taha's controversial anti-racist stance, it is surprising that the group's ‘Douce France’ became a hit at all. Yet, in the context of the mid-1980s anti-racist campaign, the song owed its popularity to its repackaging as a ‘normative’, Socialist and anti-FN anthem, when the group's intentions were to criticise republican integration and cultural conventions of prestige. Given that Carte de Séjour remain undissociable from their cover of ‘Douce France’ to this day, let us now examine the genesis, intended meanings and reception of this song.

‘Douce France’: sweet home of my childhood?

In 1986, the French record label Barclay (a subsidiary of Polygram) deemed the reputation of Carte de Séjour strong enough to release their second album, 2½. It featured ‘Douce France’, a song also released as a single which already formed part of the group's live repertoire. The original ‘Douce France’, penned and interpreted by the French singer-songwriter Charles Trenet, was first performed on stage in Paris in 1943 and released in 1947 to great acclaim. It is a slow-paced ballad on the piano and acoustic guitar, with discreet glockenspiel accents that evoke a music-box lullaby. It combines simple orchestration with gentle lyrics, in which the narrator recollects his childhood in a nameless French village. Nostalgia is omnipresent, with naïve rhymes welding together the notions of ‘bonheur’ [‘happiness’] and ‘insouciance’ [‘a happy-go-lucky attitude’]. In the chorus, the word ‘enfance’ [‘childhood’] rhymes with ‘France’, so that the song ultimately declares one's love of the nation: ‘Douce France/ Oui je t'aime’ [‘Sweet France/ I do love you’]. Because of the creation of ‘Douce France’ during the Occupation, and Trenet's own ambiguous role in that period, the song had already been the object of controversy, appearing Pétainist in its idealisation of rural France, and a symbol of the Resistance for its evocation of a free, and carefree, nation (Lloyd Reference Lloyd, Dauncey and Cannon2003, p. 167). Either way, the song's patriotism was undisputable, and Carte de Séjour's version, some 40 years later, questioned this meaning in particular.

Cover versions usually take on a new signification by entering into a dialogue with a familiar original (Plasketes Reference Plasketes2005, p. 157). In their version, Carte de Séjour left the French lyrics intact, only modifying the orchestration. Instead of a melodic introduction on the piano, ‘Douce France’ now started with Taha singing the first two verses a capella, his forced Arabic accent hardening the consonants and elongating the vowels in a muezzin-like vibrato. The oud, then the derbouki, followed. Having established the identity of the enunciator as ‘Arab’ or beur (for once, Taha was singing in French), the unchanged lyrics suggested that ‘Arabs’ expressed their love of France just as Trenet, and by extension white French people, once had. This literal interpretation also implied that, like the French, ‘Arabs’ had had childhoods in France, were an integral part of the nation, and kept ‘sweet’ memories of their life in France. This assimilationist interpretation was not intended by Taha, but it was enough of a declaration of support for French-style republican integration to be considered by many, in 1986, as a forceful riposte to the FN, the party having gained its first seats in the National Assembly in March of that year. Carte de Séjour's version was deemed politically charged, journalists comparing it to a ‘manifesto’ (Renault Reference Renault2007) and it is still remembered today as an anti-Le Pen anthem (Vignol Reference Vignol2007, p. 38; Prévost-Thomas Reference Prévost-Thomas, Bizzoni and Prévost-Thomas2008, p. 143).

Of course, Taha detested Le Pen, but his intentions in this cover were ironic rather than literal. Instead of appropriating the patriotism of the original, his ‘Douce France’ was ‘une antiphrase. C'est par ironie pour une France qui justement n’était pas douce pour les immigrés […] que nous avons choisi ce titre' [‘an antiphrasis. It was out of irony precisely because France was not sweet for immigrants, that we chose that title’] (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 129). Delivered from the perspective of an ‘Arab’, however artificial this Arab might be, the lyrics needed to be understood in reverse: hardship, not happiness, characterised the experience of North Africans in France. Taha was, moreover, attached to an ironic interpretation due to the 1986 context of the song's release. In March 1986, the PS President François Mitterrand had invited the formation of a right-wing government under the premiership of Jacques Chirac, in the first cohabitation of the Fifth Republic. In November, the Justice Minister Albin Chalandon (in collaboration with Interior Minister Charles Pasqua) introduced a proposal for restrictions to the Nationality Code, whereby the automatic access to French nationality for children born in France of foreign parents would disappear (Cole Reference Cole1998, p. 224). As mainstream politicians played to the extremist support base of the FN, legitimising a vision of France threatened by immigrants, the original patriotism of ‘Douce France’ angered Taha. This was no time to express gratitude to or pride in France.

Furthermore, covering Trenet was wilfully parodic on both a personal and cultural level. Trenet was, and remains, widely regarded as embodying ‘the French spirit’ because of his poetic lyrics (Saka and Plougastel Reference Saka and Plougastel1999, pp. 417–18). Like other ‘quality’ singer-songwriters, he embodies an ‘authentic’ national music culture which Carte de Séjour sought to mock. Indeed, the group had already covered, on stage, songs by the likes of Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel and Yves Montand (Moreira Reference Moreira1987, p. 47), each time rearranging them with an oud and delivering them in Taha's mock-Arab accent. Poking fun at these chanson greats, and the prestige attached to them, Carte de Séjour asserted the right of immigrants, like anyone, to mock France's cultural heritage. ‘On a toujours fait ça pour rigoler’ [‘We've always done this for a laugh’], Taha exclaimed (in Moreira Reference Moreira1987, p. 47), and having fun with ‘classic’ French culture must be seen as yet another expression of Carte de Séjour's parodic intentions. Furthermore, Taha despised Trenet personally (Conte Reference Conte2000, p. 39; Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 33), because of racist comments made in the 1970s on the ‘childlike innocence’ of Black people (see Zoa Reference Zoa2004, pp. 59–60). By covering Trenet, then, Carte de Séjour were far from celebrating the poet and the national pride he symbolised. Rather, the group ‘vomissait Douce France’ [‘we puked (over) Sweet France’] (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 33). They were sickened by the Chalandon proposal, sickened by the unquestioning nostalgia for a welcoming France conveyed in the original. Their irreverence towards the chanson icon Trenet, together with their controversial brand of anti-racism, set them apart from the political and cultural establishment of the time.

Jack Lang and Charles Trenet: recovering the cover

Chalandon proposed his reform of the Nationality Code on 12 November 1986, a few weeks after the release of ‘Douce France’ as a single (Favier and Martin-Rolland Reference Favier and Martin-Roland1991, p. 581). In order to convey his disapproval publicly, Taha (Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 130) suggested distributing the single to MPs in the National Assembly, an event which, thanks to a chance encounter with Jack Lang, was able to take place. Jack Lang had been Minister of Culture from 1981 to 1986, during which time he had supported the recognition of ethnic minorities in France and anti-racist organisations such as SOS Racisme (Looseley Reference Looseley1995, p. 118). The first public concert for SOS Racisme on 15 June 1985, during which Carte de Séjour had performed ‘Douce France’ live, had been heavily financed by the Ministry and, some claim, personally orchestrated by Lang himself (Cusset Reference Cusset2008, p. 105). With the start of the cohabitation, however, Lang had become a ‘mere’ opposition MP and, as the Right argued for a more restrictive definition of national identity, the opportunity to express his disagreement with the government, in partnership with young French-Arab rockers, was too good to be missed for this media-savvy, youth-friendly Socialist. Indeed, in line with Lang's aptitude for self-promotion (Cusset Reference Cusset2008, p. 325), his handing out of copies of Carte de Séjour's ‘Douce France’ to MPs in the National Assembly on 19 November 1986 became an important media event, casting more light on Lang himself and his anti-FN stance than on the artists and their disdain of the republican conception of national identity.

The event was widely covered in the press, although it remains unclear exactly how it unfolded. No TV footage exists in France's National Audiovisual Archives (INA), despite 19 November having been a Wednesday, and Wednesday debates usually being broadcast on regional television. All the press reports ignore the logistics of the event – for instance how many records were distributed, who paid for them, whether MPs were receptive or indifferent, and so on. Some specify that the distribution took place in the corridors of the Assembly, rather than in the actual amphitheatre, which would corroborate the fact that no interruption was reported in the Journal Officiel of parliamentary debates. From the transcripts of the three sessions that took place that day, it seems that Jack Lang did not intervene, although he is registered as present and voted in favour of an amendment relative to family law. Curiously, the transcripts of 19 November 1986 also reveal that the Nationality Code was not on the agenda that day.Footnote ⁷ Nonetheless, the distribution did take place, and became a widely reported fact, dramatically enhanced by the presence in the Assembly not of Carte de Séjour, but of Charles Trenet. Although Taha had initiated this coup, he did not attend it and refused a photo-shoot with Trenet for the glossy weekly Paris Match (Conte Reference Conte2000, p. 39). As a result, the main focus of media attention became Trenet's support for Lang, rather than the anti-Chalandon campaign or Carte de Séjour's single. Countless newspapers ran either the headline ‘Trenet à l'Assemblée’, or one in a similar vein: ‘Trenet au Palais Bourbon’ (Le Journal du Centre, 20 November 1986) or ‘Le Palais chantant’ (La Dépêche du Midi, 20 November 1986) – with references to Trenet's nickname of ‘Le fou chantant’ [‘The singing madman’] and to the Palais Bourbon, the alternative name for the Assembly.Footnote ⁸

Carte de Séjour were briefly mentioned in these press releases, but usually dismissed as ‘a beur group from Lyon’ without professional antecedents, the term beur also distorting the group's persona, given that they usually did not sing in French and criticised integration. Besides this, Trenet's presence obscured the parody and re-established the lyrics' original message, virtually imposing a patriotic interpretation of the single. Indeed, the symbolism of the cover was deemed ‘limpide’ [‘obvious’] (Le Monde, 21 November 1986): yes, France was threatened by Chalandon's proposal, but respectful white figures like Trenet, together with beurs paying homage to the singer, were united in rejecting the reform. By implication, they all defended the timelessness of a ‘sweet’ – that is to say assimilationist – France, alongside the immutability of the Nationality Code and its core principle of integration. Lang's declaration to the media on 19 November 1986 pursued a rhetoric of republican stability and humanist permanence: ‘[nous voulons] rappeler ce qu'a toujours été la France, un pays généreux, ouvert et accueillant’ [‘(we want to) highlight what France has always been, a generous, open and welcoming country’].Footnote ⁹ Overall, then, Lang and Trenet's effort to defend children born in France of foreign parents was certainly praiseworthy. But the mediatisation surrounding the cover's release reshaped it as a straightforward homage to Trenet and a conventional defence of republicanism in the face of extremism. Taha, by the same token (and in absentia), appeared as a PS beur militant – a far too restrictive, indeed inaccurate, description of this jack-of-all-trades.

Reception and legacy

The gap between the group's intended irony and the actual conditions of their rise to fame in 1986 largely explains the complex trace they left in French culture. This media coup certainly triggered some positive exposure, and Carte de Séjour not only received the Bus d'Acier Award in April 1987 for ‘French Best Rock Act’, a sign that the profession saw them as promising, but also featured in the best-selling teen magazine Salut in May (PPA 1987), demonstrating their mainstream appeal. In terms of minority politics, their relative success showed a degree of progress in French society, compared to the colonial period when ‘Arabness’ was purely mediated through the prism of exoticism (Liauzu and Liauzu Reference Liauzu and Liauzu2002), and the 1960s when only the pied-noir Enrico Macias popularised ‘Arab’ music (Dicale Reference Dicale2006, p. 368). By the late 1980s, Carte de Séjour's modest fame showed that a non-pied-noir ‘Arab’ identity was at last welcome in France. However, the promise of large-scale success never materialised, not least because the media seemed unsure what to make of the group.

Many radio stations, from traditional chanson-oriented stations to newer ‘commercial’ ones like Skyrock, refused to play Carte de Séjour. Whether this was due to straightforward ‘anti-Arab’ racism (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 130), or not, it is certainly true that, six months after their Lang-led mediatisation, the group's album was still only selling very slowly (PPA 1987). The artists' association with the single ‘Douce France’, rather than with the rest of their output, also turned them into ‘un phénomène social’ [‘a social freakshow’] (Taha, in Pascaud Reference Pascaud2007, p. 16), in the sense that journalists concentrated mainly on their ethnicity, usually ignoring their artistic singularity. ‘Rachid voulait parler musique’ [‘Rachid wanted to talk about music’], a journalist self-consciously reflected in late November 1986, ‘[mais] je ne lui pose que des questions sur le fameux Code de la Nationalité’ [‘but I only ask him questions on the famous Nationality Code’] (Brunet-Lecomte Reference Brunet-Lecomte1986). At home, the group suffered from not being taken seriously as artists, something that, for Taha, epitomised ethnic discrimination in France, while elsewhere in Europe, where the group toured in 1987, they were treated ‘as French rockers’ (Taha, in Moreira Reference Moreira1987, p. 32). Frustrated with what commentators have described as biased coverage (Conte Reference Conte2000, p. 35), Carte de Séjour split up in early 1989, without having released any new music since 1986.Footnote ¹⁰ The question of artistic credibility and critical reception thus remains crucial in elucidating the misrepresentation of Carte de Séjour today, for the band, beyond the somewhat accidental mediatisation of their ‘Douce France’, craved recognition as rockers.

In France rock music benefits, alongside the home-grown style of chanson, from the highest degree of prestige in popular music, due in part to its early mediatisation through a sophisticated music press (Teillet Reference Teillet, Dauncey and Cannon2003, p. 177). Something typically ignored in academic discussions of Carte de Séjour is their rock identity, which the central presence of the electric guitar, bass and drums in their music nonetheless spell out. Taha's repeated declarations that ‘je suis un rocker’ (Fontana Reference Fontana2007, p. 193), and that punk-rock was always his true calling (Moreira Reference Moreira1987, pp. 25, 46; Conte Reference Conte2000, p. 36; Pascaud Reference Pascaud2007, p. 18; Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, pp. 143, 187, 201, 250, 246) hammer home this identity. For a handful of music critics, Taha's innovative use of Arabic effectively gave him credentials as a ‘true’ rocker (Hakem Reference Hakem1999, p. 40) and the group have been commended as ‘un grand moment de l'histoire du rock français’ [‘important in the history of French rock music’] by rock journalist Gilles Verlant (Reference Verlant2000, p. 91).

However, more often than not, critics have misinterpreted Carte de Séjour's musical identity, for reasons linked to ethnic prejudice and the group's provocative actions. For instance, by virtue of their songs being in Arabic and their lead singer Algerian, Carte de Séjour are still widely described as a raï group (e.g. Saka and Plougastel Reference Saka and Plougastel1999, p. 172; Dicale Reference Dicale2006, p. 369). Raï, however, is a pop genre that arrived in France from 1986 onwards, and which, despite its original contestatory value in its native Algeria, evolved into a mainstream, crowd-pleasing genre, epitomised by the sentimental lyrics of Khaled and the smooth delivery of Faudel (Daoudi Reference Daoudi2000, pp. 45, 66). Carte de Séjour, by contrast, started playing together in France in 1980–1981, and took an altogether more confrontational stance in their lyrics, performance and public declarations. On this issue, Taha (Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 187) is adamant that his participation in the ‘1, 2, 3 Soleils’ concert of 1998, alongside Khaled and Faudel, did him a disservice by cementing the erroneous perception that he was a raï singer.

If Taha's perceived ethnicity sometimes got in the way of his identification as a French rocker, his group's reception was also affected by his refusal to conform to the unwritten rules of French rock culture, which have, since the 1960s, been dominated by an almost watertight separation between songs with a message and songs for fun (Looseley Reference Looseley2003, p. 67). As explained earlier, however, Carte de Séjour combined the two approaches, appearing politically committed on occasions, yet remaining a light-hearted, parodic music group at heart, that did not prioritise the promotion of a ‘message’. Taha could, for instance, claim that music should be a political act (in Conte Reference Conte2000, p. 38), proudly evoking his participation in the 1983 rally ‘La Marche des Beurs’ as proof of local-level activism (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, p. 108; also Moreira Reference Moreira1987, p. 49), but also reject the labels of ‘artiste contestataire’ [‘protest artist’], ‘militant’ and ‘anti-racist’ (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, pp. 106–7, 269, 274), ridiculing left-wing militants for their strictness and moroseness (in Moreira Reference Moreira1987, p. 51). Taha was also scathing, as we have seen, towards the elitism and universalist discourse dominant in France's rock music culture. Moreover, Carte de Séjour had a generally funky sound and lively stage presence that differed from the more purist rock style and performance of many French rockers. In his autobiography, Taha dwells on his love of dancing, partying and cross-dressing (Taha Reference Taha and Lacout2008, pp. 82, 87, 90, 98) and, in an early review, Guemriche (Reference Guemriche1984) rightly noted the group's primary intention to ‘faire danser’ [‘get people dancing’]. There is, unfortunately, insufficient space to analyse Taha's on-stage eccentricities here, but commentators have acknowledged his taste for disguise (Sebbar Reference Sebbar1985, p. 155; Conte Reference Conte2000, p. 35; Williamson Reference Williamson2004) and other signs of a queer or ‘pop’ sensibility that sits uneasily with the ‘earnest’ practice of most rock in France. Combining protest outbursts with sheer entertainment, then, Carte de Séjour sent out mixed signals that confused their critical reception in France and thwarted their success.