Ici, c’est le tunnel le plus long du monde: vous entrez en France et vous ressortez à Ouarzazate!
Georges Frêche, the mayor of Montpellier, at the opening of the first line of the Montpellier tramway in June 2000Footnote 1
For the past forty years the question of how to deal with postcolonial minorities has been a perennial feature of the French political landscape. The debate has taken many forms. In the early 1980s the newly elected Socialist government popularised the idea of the droit à la différence – a soft form of French multiculturalism that aimed to raise the profile and legitimacy of minority politics and regional languages. At much the same time the Front National began to gain prominence with its first electoral successes in 1983. Their campaigns were largely built on an aggressive critique of France's attitude towards postcolonial minorities: the (Socialist) state was deemed to be excessively lax, allowing immigrants to arrive in ever greater numbers and exploit the welfare system.Footnote 2 The so-called ‘headscarf affair’ in 1989 made sure that the issue remained at the top of the agenda. Once again, the validity of minority politics was the main concern but, by this time, the voices in favour of a tolerant droit à la différence approach had been drowned out. Instead, France witnessed a resurgence of republican rhetoric that reinforced the principles of French secularism (laïcité) and re-emphasised the traditional Jacobin hostility towards minority politics and expressions of difference within the public sphere.Footnote 3
The ‘headscarf affair’ cast a long shadow over French politics, ultimately leading to the ban on religious symbols in schools in 2005 and the ‘burka ban’ in 2010. During this period there were dissenting voices – public figures who argued for a more flexible approach – but they faced stiff opposition from a wide array of intellectuals, academics and politicians who maintained that any concessions would result in the inexorable rise of communautarisme.Footnote 4 Unlike the English ‘communitarianism’, which refers to a specific branch of multicultural theory within the political thought of Anglo-American liberalism, the term communautarisme has a more polemical meaning in France where it describes the dangerous fragmentation of the body politic when faced with multiple and overlapping expressions of religious, ethnic or racial politics. Over time, it has become a catch-all term for French fears about social and political disintegration, as well as a vehicle for all manner of negative stereotypes about British multiculturalism and American ‘ghettos’.Footnote 5 Its ubiquity is reflected in the fact that, in the last decade, it has been used by political parties of all stripes. Whether in discussions about the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages or the distribution of halal meat, the first word to appear in editorials and television debates is invariably communautarisme.
This passion has not been matched by academic work on the subject. In reality, we know relatively little about how minority politics actually works at a local level in France. There is a rich sociological and ethnographic literature on the integration of minority, primarily immigrant, populations.Footnote 6 There is a growing interest in the effects of ‘postcolonialism’ on French politics.Footnote 7 There have even been attempts to write ‘ethnic’ histories, such as Pap Ndiaye's work on the position of black people (‘la condition noire’) in France.Footnote 8 But case studies of the relationship between minorities and political mobilisation in the Fifth Republic are few and far between. The best have focused on the integration into metropolitan France of the million or so French Algerians of European origin (pieds-noirs) who fled Algeria at the time of independence in 1962 and whose plight features prominently in the case of Montpellier.Footnote 9 Yet many questions remain unanswered. How have postcolonial minorities been mobilised by local political leaders? How have they sought to impose their ideas and priorities on local authorities? How have local governments managed competing minority identity claims? These are the key issues that I want to explore in this article. The aim is to give a richer portrait of how minority politics has developed and been instrumentalised in a large provincial French town in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Montpellier is a particularly good site for this kind of study. It is sufficiently small to have remained under unitary political control but diverse enough to provide opportunities for different minorities to assert themselves in the public sphere. Significantly, it has also undergone a period of sustained population growth since the 1960s, a large proportion of which has been driven by successive waves of postcolonial migrants – first the Algerian rapatriés in 1962, and subsequently Moroccan labour migration in the 1980s and 1990s. This built on existing migration flows from Spain and a significant expansion in the student population – one of the largest in France.Footnote 10 The result is that Montpellier has earned a reputation as a dynamic and youthful melting-pot in which minority political activism of all kinds has flourished. Finally, a key reason for choosing Montpellier is the continuity in administration. The city was governed from the late 1970s until the mid 2000s by the larger-than-life political figure of Georges Frêche, whose charisma, idiosyncratic personality and well-documented talent for clientelism offer a unique insight into the inner workings of provincial French politics.Footnote 11
A detailed examination of minority politics in Montpellier therefore has the potential to reveal a good deal about how local politics is done under the Fifth Republic. The model of the local ‘notable’ – anchored in a specific region and drawing on a web of networks to hold on to power – is crucial to our understanding of the nineteenth century.Footnote 12 But we do not have a clear idea of how the politics of decentralisation under the Fifth Republic has affected the practice of local power, nor do we have an adequate account of how localities have dealt with France's highly contested postcolonial memory, much of which has been transmitted through migrants. France's postcolonial ‘memory wars’ have received national attention but they have mostly been fought at the local level in debates over statues, museums and urban planning as minorities have jostled to make themselves heard in an increasingly diffuse political space.Footnote 13 Indeed, I will suggest that the communautarisme that has been so fiercely debated by public intellectuals is a natural part of local politics in cities like Montpellier. The skill of a politician like Frêche is that he was able to turn it to his advantage. He, as with most left-leaning French politicians of the Fifth Republic, repeatedly and boisterously proclaimed his commitment to anti-communautariste and republican principles, but the reality on the ground was very different. While journalists focused on his famed ‘big mouth’ and political indiscretions, he was patiently shaping Montpellier's minority politics in his own image and providing a template of how to manage the everyday life of postcolonial France.
The costs of decolonisation
In December 1964 the French journalist Olivier Todd published a profile of Montpellier in the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. Its main purpose was to provide an assessment of the left's chances in the upcoming municipal elections but it simultaneously painted a picture of a city in transition, turned upside down by huge in-migration and a corresponding growth in economic investment. In 1945, Montpellier's population was less than 100,000; by the 1970s, it was almost 300,000. The mayor at the time – François Delmas, who ruled uninterrupted from 1959 to 1977 – was encouraging prominent firms such as IBM to move to the city, thereby giving a boost to an already flourishing local economy. With large numbers of small businesses being renovated in the city centre and the successful development of a zone industrielle on the outskirts, Montpellier appeared to be the archetype of the boom town during the Trente Glorieuses of French post-war economic growth. Todd went so far as to say that the sun-washed streets reminded him of the ‘joli désordre’ of Phoenix, Arizona.Footnote 14
Amidst the rather a-political talk of economic growth, however, there were uncharacteristically strong emotions hidden just below the surface. When Todd asked Delmas about the secret to his longevity and popularity, the source of this emotion slipped out: ‘j’ai mis la politique générale de côté . . . Depuis juillet 1962, je ne lis plus la première et la dernière page des journaux . . . Tout ce à quoi je croyais est mort . . . l’Algérie française’. For Delmas, as for many other inhabitants of Montpellier in the 1960s, the decolonisation of Algeria was the unavoidable horizon of contemporary politics, and it had a profound impact on the city. Even for those who were not conscripted or politically involved, it was impossible to avoid the threat of terrorism. There were over thirty separate bomb attacks in the first three months of 1962 and Montpellier quickly earned a reputation in the press as the ‘most bombed city in France’.Footnote 15 Many of the perpetrators were members of the secret armed organisation, Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a radical network of pro-Algérie française militants in Algeria and metropolitan France founded in 1961. Their numbers remained small but they actively recruited amongst the city's large student population.Footnote 16 This was not difficult given that the university, like many others in France, was sharply divided between anti-colonial activists grouped around one of the national student unions, the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (UNEF), and supporters of Algérie française, who gravitated towards the Fédération National des Étudiants de France (FNEF).Footnote 17 A clear indication of the depth of feeling was that, even as late as 1967, the FNEF remained the majority union: by this time, Montpellier was the only campus in France where this was the case.Footnote 18
Existing tensions were exacerbated by the arrival in Montpellier of tens of thousands of rapatriés in the period 1958–62. The administrative term rapatrié brought together the European population of Algeria and Muslim soldiers who fought alongside the French army during the Algerian War, many of whom were forced to flee at the end of the war in 1962. But in everyday parlance the two groups were differentiated: the former were known as the pieds-noirs and the latter were called the harkis. As we will see, they did not suffer the same fate – the harkis were spatially and socio-economically marginalised for several decades – but both groups contributed to the reshaping of the city. In the 1960s and 1970s it was above all the growing sense of pied-noir political identity and activism that penetrated and transformed the political landscape. This was true from the moment of arrival. The decision to move to Montpellier was, in the minds of many pieds-noirs, a political one. They appreciated the ‘Mediterranean culture’ and the attractive climate, but they also knew that Delmas was their ‘friend’.Footnote 19 The mayor had repeatedly come out in favour of Algérie française, to the point of provoking a political crisis in April 1962 when eight members of the municipal council resigned in protest at his refusal to condemn OAS terrorism.Footnote 20 But, while his left-wing opponents were calling for his immediate resignation in the wake of the crisis, Delmas was gaining formidable political capital amongst the pieds-noirs. His open opposition to the decolonisation of Algeria offered hope for a population wounded by their ‘betrayal’ at the hands of the metropolitan government and its president, Charles de Gaulle.Footnote 21 Unlike the mayor of Marseille (Gaston Defferre), whom the pieds-noirs believed was resolutely hostile to their presence, Delmas demonstrated his commitment by personally greeting the new rapatriés at a large reception centre in Montpellier and pushing hard for the construction of temporary accommodation.Footnote 22
In the medium-term, too, the mayor was true to his reputation. He had promised housing and jobs – the two most pressing concerns for the new arrivals – and a booming economy allowed him to deliver on both promises. Documents reveal the extent to which the question of housing was a veritable headache for local authorities overwhelmed by thousands of new arrivals.Footnote 23 The problem was acute in Montpellier: of the one million rapatriés who had migrated to France by the end of 1962, as many as 50,000–60,000 of them arrived in the Hérault, with at least 25,000 of them choosing to settle in the region's largest city.Footnote 24 There were already plans for urban expansion to the west of Montpellier and these were rapidly earmarked for the new arrivals. Between 1962 and 1968 an entire network of new neighbourhoods sprang up amidst the ageing vineyards and parched garrigue countryside. The most emblematic was the Petit Bard, a complex of tower blocks with 860 flats. Thousands also moved into the new Lemasson, Saint-Martin, La Pergola and Mas Drevon neighbourhoods. Finally, hundreds of flats – out of a total of more than 10,000 – in the vast La Paillade tower block complex inaugurated in 1967 were reserved for the pieds-noirs.Footnote 25 A large majority of these flats were classed as social housing (habitations à loyers modérées, HLM) and therefore available at preferential rates. By offering them to the pieds-noirs, Delmas made an astute political calculation. He was genuinely concerned about the rapatriés but he also knew that he would be guaranteed re-election with such a devoted support base.Footnote 26 It was a strategy that paid off handsomely. Without official statistics, it is hard to know the voting intentions of the pieds-noirs in the 1960s and early 1970s, but community leaders estimate that at least three-quarters of them supported Delmas, regardless of their voting preferences in national elections.Footnote 27 The mayor used local political figures of pied-noir origin like Vincent Amoros and Willy Diméglio to ensure that his political message passed directly to the community.Footnote 28 Still today, local community leaders are loyal to his memory: without Delmas, they argue, Montpellier would be a sleepy provincial backwater.Footnote 29
Socio-economic integration was facilitated by economic growth. In addition to occupying new urban spaces, pied-noir families took over failing small businesses and renovated shops in the city centre. New restaurants – like Chez Prosper on the main artery Boulevard Pasteur – became meeting points where members of the community could gather around a couscous and reminisce about Algeria.Footnote 30 In peri-urban areas to the north and east of the city, the pieds-noirs renovated vineyards and farms, which had been badly affected by the harsh winter of 1956. In these areas, they were often given a frosty reception: the new arrivals regarded the rural Languedoc as an undeveloped backwater, while local inhabitants resented the subsidies the pieds-noirs received, which amounted to 130 million francs in the Hérault alone by early 1964.Footnote 31 In time, sustained growth and low unemployment muted these criticisms, to the point that pieds-noirs soon saw themselves as the driving force behind the region's economic success. This view is largely borne out by contemporary sources, as well as the few studies that exist: population growth and state support for the pieds-noirs flooded the region with money and a willing labour force.Footnote 32 By the mid 1970s local authorities could congratulate themselves on the remarkably smooth integration of a substantial migrant population.
But socio-economic integration did not automatically translate into political integration. On the contrary, the pieds-noirs felt a growing need to express their grievances through community mobilisation and the first stirrings of identity politics. Of course, pied-noir associations in Montpellier and the surrounding region had existed since the 1950s. Some had strongly political agendas, especially during the final years of the war, but most were focused on providing for the immediate material needs of the community in the years following their departure from Algeria.Footnote 33 With the exception of national-level associations such as the Association Nationale des Français d’Afrique du Nord, d’Outre-Mer et de leurs Amis (ANFANOMA, founded in 1956), they tended to be little more than networks of people grouped around a single individual. In Montpellier, the best known – and most charismatic – was the doctor Jean Rosecchi. The city's pieds-noirs remember him today as a vigorous community leader; some even endow him with mystical healing properties.Footnote 34 It seems more likely that he charmed his fellow exiles by listening sympathetically to their tales of woe and providing succour and medication (or both).
By the 1970s, however, pieds-noirs associations had become more politically assertive. In particular, they mobilised around the issue of compensation for damages and property abandoned in Algeria. Despite the substantial funds made available after the end of the Algerian War for their socio-economic integration, there was a widespread sense amongst the pieds-noirs that the French state had shirked its duty, not least because the official line was that the responsibility for compensation lay with the newly independent Algerian state. Repeated attempts on the part of pieds-noirs associations to raise the issue in the Assemblée Nationale yielded meagre results until the first set of laws providing for basic compensation were passed in 1970.Footnote 35 But this was still not enough and frustration led to the formation of new associations that were more explicit in their political aims.Footnote 36 They argued that, in cities like Montpellier, the pieds-noirs were an important electoral constituency. If they could be persuaded to back only those candidates who openly supported compensation and adhered to a pied-noir narrative of the Algerian War, they had the potential to decide the fate of local politicians. The pre-eminent example of this new, more assertive style was the Rassemblement et coordination unitaires des rapatriés et spoliés (RECOURS), founded in 1976.Footnote 37 Like the ANFANOMA, it wanted to influence the debate at the national level. It nevertheless maintained a special relationship with Montpellier since this was the hometown of its emblematic leader, Jacques Roseau. It was also one of the cities in which RECOURS tested its electoral strategy – the ‘vote sanction’ – with spectacular results.
Georges Frêche and the pieds-noirs
The toppling of François Delmas by Georges Frêche in 1977 was a momentous political event.Footnote 38 But it was more than simply a temporary swing to the left after decades of centre-right rule; rather, it was indicative of a fundamental shift in the city's demographic and cultural profile. A younger and more diverse electorate no longer saw itself in Delmas's likeable flat-capped pragmatism. They preferred his youthful and straight-talking opponent, whose electoral slogan was ‘changer la ville, changer la vie’.Footnote 39 It is significant that Frêche, like a good proportion of his electorate, was not from Montpellier.Footnote 40 He was born in 1938 in the medium-sized town of Puylaurens in the Tarn, fifty kilometres (about thirty miles) east of Toulouse. In 1957 he left his home region to continue his studies in Paris and, a year later, he succeeded in gaining a place at the prestigious HEC business school. For the next eleven years, he would be a full-time student, completing his studies at HEC alongside further qualifications in history and law. In 1968, he completed two separate doctoral theses on the social and economic history of the Midi-Pyrénées region in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries and the following year he came second in the history agrégation exam. With a bewildering array of diplomas in hand, he was ready for an academic career. Blocked from taking up a post in his hometown of Toulouse because the doyens of the university's right-leaning law and history faculties did not look kindly on Frêche's left-wing past, he was forced to look elsewhere. He expressed a preference for an institution in the south and in late 1969 negotiated his first full-time post as a professor of legal history at the University of Montpellier.
Frêche continued to teach at the university every year until his retirement in 2007.Footnote 41 But his real focus was politics. He had briefly flirted with Maoism while a student in the late 1950s and, although he quickly abandoned the movement, the lessons of his youthful engagement remained.Footnote 42 When he began to run for office in Montpellier in the early 1970s under the banner of the newly formed Parti Socialiste (PS), he used the style of his dissident politics to breathe life into a moribund local socialist movement. Traditionally, the Hérault and neighbouring départements were divided between the right-leaning cities and the left-leaning countryside. But by the 1960s, the remnants of the local SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) had been weakened by the multiple splits within the post-war non-communist left and regular electoral setbacks. Moreover, the region's largest city – Montpellier – was dominated by the centre-right. The challenge for the young Frêche was to unite the disparate parties of the left into an electoral force that could compete with the entrenched interests of the right.Footnote 43 A key part of his strategy was to put in place a local coalition between the PS and the Communists that pre-empted and reflected what was happening at a national level. Most importantly, it was a strategy that brought dividends. To everyone's surprise, Frêche's united left list was narrowly defeated in the municipal elections in 1971, but the fresh-faced rabble-rouser triumphed in the 1973 legislative elections in the Montpellier-Lunel constituency that had belonged exclusively to the right for decades. Finally, in 1977, he claimed the most coveted prize of all when he was elected mayor of Montpellier. For the next three decades Frêche would fashion the city in his image and mobilise its nascent identity politics for his own ends.
Even before his victory in 1977, Frêche realised the importance of casting his net wide and appealing directly to minorities. His first campaigns were noteworthy for their political diversity: his electoral lists included Socialists and Communists, alongside another former Maoist and a former OAS activist.Footnote 44 But his greatest success was amongst the pieds-noirs. By turning them away from their ‘saviour’ Delmas, he was virtually guaranteed re-election. His achievement was even more impressive given that, at first glance, his ecumenical approach seemed to be incompatible with the single-minded political agenda of the pieds-noirs. Again, the hard work began before 1977. From the moment he was elected a député in 1973, Frêche championed the rapatrié cause: one of the first questions he asked in the Assemblée Nationale related to the compensation of pied-noir farmers from Morocco.Footnote 45 He also forged a strong relationship with Jacques Roseau, who became his ambassador in the community. The key turning-point was when Delmas decided to align himself with the centre-right Républicains indépendants (RI) party after the successful election of their presidential candidate Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1974. Hitherto, Delmas's independence from party politics had prevented him from becoming tarnished by the lengthy and inconclusive negotiations over compensation for the rapatriés. This was no longer the case: as a member of the ruling party, he now shared responsibility for its failings. Over time, local pied-noir associations like RECOURS became increasingly dissatisfied and urged their members to transfer their support from Delmas to Frêche at the ballot box. By 1977 even television journalists had begun to discuss how the changing allegiances of the pieds-noirs were threatening to tip the balance in favour of the young pretender.Footnote 46
That pieds-noirs were voting to the left was in itself a surprise. The few sociological studies that exist suggest that the majority of pieds-noirs have tended to vote for the right or the extreme-right since their arrival in France.Footnote 47 This is both because of the left's anti-colonial credentials and because many left-wing politicians have been wary of associating themselves with a community that is seen to have been complicit in the worst excesses of French imperialism. As an erstwhile Maoist who had cut his teeth during the years of anti-colonial student politics in Paris in the late 1950s, Frêche conformed perfectly to this left-wing background. And yet he put aside whatever qualms he may have had when it came to running for office in Montpellier. He knew that, without the pieds-noirs, he had no chance of winning. It was undoubtedly an opportunistic move, but opportunism alone cannot explain three decades of electoral success. His popularity amongst the pieds-noirs also relied on the way in which Frêche reshaped French socialism to suit his context. He argued that, because of their proletarian roots as Spanish, Italian, French or Maltese labour migrants to Algeria, the pieds-noirs actually ‘belonged’ to the left. ‘Back in Algeria’ they were on the left, so why not in metropolitan France? More generally, he played down the left's anti-colonial past. His famous catchphrase – ‘ma mère c’est Jaurès, mon père c’est de Gaulle’ – allowed him to claim an extremely broad definition of the nation. The vast majority of pieds-noirs detested de Gaulle for his ‘abandonment’ of Algeria, but they were nevertheless keen to be integrated fully into a postcolonial French national narrative. Frêche's generous conception of the nation made this possible.
Once he had been elected, the new mayor set about ensuring that the pieds-noirs would remain loyal supporters and he continued to use Roseau as his privileged interlocutor. Frêche's friendship with the president of RECOURS shielded him from the damaging effects of the ‘vote sanction’ when he stood for re-election in the municipal elections of 1983.Footnote 48 Elsewhere in France, RECOURS moved to punish left-wing politicians for their unwillingness to pass any compensation legislation during their first two years of office, but Frêche was spared.Footnote 49 Four years later in 1986, Roseau took the unprecedented step of endorsing the Gaullist RPR party in the 1986 legislative elections. His move was controversial amongst pieds-noirs, who accused him of ‘selling out’ to the enemy, but he gained major concessions and a new compensation law from the RPR government in 1987. Fortunately for Frêche, none of this had any impact on his local popularity: in 1989 his list was re-elected in the first round of the municipal elections and, in 1995, he emerged unscathed from the collapse of the Socialist vote in the final years of the Mitterrand presidency.
By this time, Frêche was the undisputed king of Montpellier. But he always kept the pieds-noirs in his sights. One of the most effective ways of doing this was to subsidise an emerging network of pied-noir associations and social clubs (amicales). Numerous scholars have emphasised the crucial role of this pied-noir civil society in overcoming the trauma of exile and recreating Algeria in metropolitan France.Footnote 50 Frêche went one step further and used pied-noir associations to further his electoral reach. He made concerted efforts to support the construction of a specifically pied-noir civil society from the moment he took power in 1977.Footnote 51 His most significant achievement was the construction in 1980 of a community centre called the ‘Maison des Rapatriés’ – one of only six in France.Footnote 52 A small square building at the heart of the Mas Drevon neighbourhood, it is still the focal point for community life today. It has two large rooms for meetings, parties and social events, and it is where all the major pied-noir associations have their offices, alongside those of the many amicales. Not only did this centralisation encourage better relations between disparate and often conflicting groups, it also ensured that no one could escape the patronage of the mairie. Even associations like the Cercle Algérianiste de Montpellier, who claim never to have accepted subsidies, were more than happy to have their offices at the Maison des Rapatriés.Footnote 53 During the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, pied-noir organisations in Montpellier were so dependent on Frêche that there has been bitter internecine squabbling since his death in 2010. Not even the dramatic assassination of Jacques Roseau by three elderly pied-noir extremists in 1993 could break the spell.Footnote 54 Frêche simply transferred his allegiances to Jacques Roseau's cousin – Gilbert Roseau – and renamed a park in honour of his assassinated friend. A few years later, in 1997, Gilbert was elected socialist député from Montpellier; such success would have been inconceivable without Frêche's assistance.
As the wave of pied-noir civil society activism in the 1980s gave way to a nationwide debate about French postcolonial memory in the 1990s, Frêche continued to adapt to the times. In 1996 he agreed to host (and partly fund) the national conference of the ANFANOMA in Montpellier at which he gave a keynote speech wholeheartedly endorsing the pied-noir cause.Footnote 55 At the same meeting, he mentioned his desire to build a museum in Montpellier on the history of the French presence in Algeria. In 2003, the conseil municipal approved the project.Footnote 56 The museum, which will be housed in the Hôtel Montcalm, was due to open in 2007 but is still awaiting full approval by the French state. When it is inaugurated, it will be the first museum in France to focus solely on the impact of French colonisation in North Africa. Given the circumstances in which it was conceived, it seems likely that the exhibitions will adhere closely to the privileged pied-noir narratives of benevolent colonisation and interracial harmony in Algeria.Footnote 57 If so, it will rightly be considered as Frêche's posthumous gift to the pieds-noirs.
It should be emphasised that mayoral engagement with pied-noir memory did not suddenly begin in the 1990s. In 1975, for example, Delmas had written to the then prime minister, Jacques Chirac, to protest against the government policy of encouraging municipalities to rename streets after the day on which the Évian Accords came into force (19 March 1962).Footnote 58 The pieds-noirs have always maintained that, by choosing to commemorate the ‘end’ of the Algerian War on this date, the French state has ignored atrocities committed against French citizens in subsequent months. By stating publicly that he would refuse to inaugurate a ‘rue du 19 mars 1962’ in Montpellier, Delmas was taking a clear stance in the ‘memory wars’ that opposed the pieds-noirs and the French state in the 1970s. But the difference in the 1990s was that Frêche was also at odds with his own party. He, too, repeatedly refused to inaugurate a ‘rue du 19 mars 1962’ during his time as mayor but he went further by openly supporting the highly controversial 2005 law which stipulated that schools should teach the ‘positive effects of French colonisation in North Africa’. Much to the embarrassment of the PS national leadership, he interrupted a meeting of the Montpellier city council shortly after the debate on the law in parliament in November 2005 and embarked on a lengthy diatribe against ‘self-hating’ colonial guilt that ended with him singing patriotic colonial-era army songs.Footnote 59 It was the kind of flowery and melodramatic public intervention for which he was famous, but it was also exactly the kind of outspoken support that had allowed him to hold on to the pied-noir vote in Montpellier for more than two decades. Frêche instinctively understood that the public manipulation of ideology, memory and minority identities had become vital aspects of contemporary French politics.
Integrating Montpellier's Muslim communities
On 11 February 2006 Frêche was caught on camera hurling abuse at two sons of harki soldiers during a memorial service for Jacques Roseau in Montpellier. As part of his tirade, he called them ‘des sous-hommes’. Within days, his words had created a public sensation. Anti-racism organisations condemned the former mayor for evoking the racism of the Second World War; the leaders of the PS accused him of perverting the values of the left; and, as the media storm grew, his local right-wing opponents gleefully pointed out the dangers of their sworn enemy's ‘grande gueule’.Footnote 60 Finally, on 28 February, the party leader François Hollande was forced to suspend an embattled Frêche from the PS. Over the next few years, the man who had made his populist and anti-elitist language into an invaluable asset found himself repeatedly pilloried by the media. It was no longer possible for his statements in 2008 about the number of blacks in the French football team to pass unnoticed; nor could he claim in 2010 that a senior PS politician of Jewish origin – Laurent Fabius – had a ‘rather un-Catholic face’ (‘tronche pas très catholique’) without incurring the wrath of Jewish and anti-racist groups. Inevitably, the media frenzy distorted Frêche's words and pulled them out of context; on each occasion, his explanations were plausible and there is little evidence to suggest that he was racist or anti-Semitic.Footnote 61 But what is most interesting is that, in all three cases, the controversy had to do with race, origin or religion. Could it be that Frêche's sure grasp of identity politics was beginning to falter?
In fact, these incidents merely revealed to the wider public the extent of the networks Frêche had constructed to sustain his specific brand of minority politics. Although his management of the pied-noir community provides the most detailed case study, the same pattern of clientelism and patronage was replicated in the case of other minorities, most notably the harkis. While the story of the harkis has often been told alongside that of the pieds-noirs – not least by the pieds-noirs themselves, who have sought to instrumentalise their fellow exiles for political purposes – their trajectories after 1962 were rather different. On arrival in France, the 80,000 or so harkis did not benefit from the same state support that was offered to the pieds-noirs. Instead, many of them were first interned in refugee camps, the vast majority of which were located in rural southern France.Footnote 62 A number of these were relatively close to Montpellier, especially those of Lodève and Saint-Pons-de-Thomières. This meant that Montpellier became a natural destination for harkis who were looking for work after leaving the camps, especially since the city and its mayor promised to receive all rapatriés with open arms.Footnote 63
As in the case of the pieds-noirs, Delmas demonstrated his commitment by offering material assistance. In a clear indication of the different administrative attitudes to the two rapatrié populations, there were specific instructions to give priority to pied-noir social housing requests. Nevertheless, by 1965 the municipality had moved forty-seven harki families into prefabricated buildings at the Cités de Portaly, Massaviols, Redon and Manœuvre.Footnote 64 Some were also recruited to work on city construction projects, the outstanding example of which was the Zoo de Lunaret in 1963–4. The municipality hired approximately fifty harkis for the construction of the zoological park, which covers eighty hectares (c.200 acres). Once it was completed, two harki families were offered accommodation nearby and became the zoo's caretakers. In a remarkable recreation of colonial social structures, the pied-noir Marcel Gallet was subsequently appointed as manager of the zoo in 1964. He was an enthusiastic botanist, but he also spoke Arabic. He could communicate easily with ‘his’ harkis and became their ‘patron’. Soon, the Zoo de Lunaret had become a microcosm of a transplanted colonial-era botanical garden, with a determined and benevolent scientist looking after his ‘natives’. This comparison was all the more powerful because local pied-noir associations drew parallels between the Zoo de Lunaret and the Hamma gardens in Algiers, built by the French in 1832.Footnote 65 Quite apart from the way in which such a comparison contributed to a sense of colonial nostalgia, it also allowed the pieds-noirs to minimise the role of the harkis.
When Gallet died in 1995, he received something akin to a state funeral, with numerous local dignitaries (including Frêche) present at the memorial service. But his death did little to appease an emerging memory battle over the Zoo de Lunaret. Pied-noir associations scored the first victory when, in 2007, the municipality approved the creation of an Esplanade Marcel Gallet at the entrance to the zoo.Footnote 66 Visitors can now read a short biography of Gallet and see a picture of him as they walk in. Not to be outdone, Montpellier's harki associations demanded official recognition as well and, in 2011, the city inaugurated a plaque to commemorate those who helped to build the zoo. A ceremony was held, at which the new Socialist mayor Hélène Mandroux expressed her gratitude to the ‘harkis bâtisseurs’.Footnote 67 Clearly, the national controversy surrounding Frêche's comments in 2006 had given Montpellier's harki associations renewed legitimacy. Any attempt to marginalise them risked a further public outcry. Harki associations could take advantage of this unusual political context to gain recognition of their separate status, while Mandroux's public gesture was designed to mark her out from her predecessor (and mentor).
Yet for all the attempts on the part of the new mayor to break with the past, her relations with the harkis relied on networks that were put in place by Frêche. His practice of identifying privileged community interlocutors like Jacques Roseau was repeated time and again in his dealings with the city's other minorities. In the case of the harkis, the chosen representative was Kathir Nedromi. Before joining the French army during the Algerian War, he had been a farmer. After his arrival in France in 1963, he was recruited as a construction worker on the Zoo de Lunaret site and he remained involved with the everyday running of the park in subsequent years. This may explain why, in 1974, he was put in charge of the city's first mosque, Al-Tawba, located in the Abattoirs neighbourhood of central Montpellier.Footnote 68 When Frêche became mayor in 1977, he immediately began searching for individuals who could act as intermediaries between him and the growing Muslim community. The fact that Nedromi was a rapatrié and already close to the municipality made him the ideal choice. In 1986, the municipality offered Nedromi a subsidy to open a second, larger mosque not far from the first one. The one condition was that it should be affiliated to the Grande Mosquée de Paris (GMP), the pre-eminent Islamic organisation in France, with close ties to the French state. This – and Nedromi's loyalty – ensured that the new El-Nour mosque would remain firmly within Frêche's web of influence.
Frêche's next gift to the Muslim community was the construction of a multi-purpose hall with a capacity of 2,500, the Salle Polyvalente Ibn-Sina, in the Petit Bard neighbourhood in 1997.Footnote 69 By the 1990s, the character of the Petit Bard had changed significantly: the overwhelming majority of pieds-noirs had moved out and been replaced by newer migrants from North Africa. The ageing tower blocks had begun to deteriorate and the whole area had become a byword for petty crime.Footnote 70 But, despite the declining socio-economic conditions, it was still an important electoral constituency. Frêche realised he needed to adapt his politics to the changing demographic, hence the decision to build a dedicated community centre for Muslims along the same lines as the Maison des Rapatriés. Predictably, Nedromi was given responsibility for the new centre, although he ensured continuity by handing over the keys of the El-Nour mosque to Mohamed Nourredine, another harki and a friend of his from Lodève. In this way, the municipality retained its long-standing links with Nedromi, while simultaneously making public its commitment to the Muslim community. Moreover, since the building was a salle polyvalente rather than a mosque, it remained under the control of the city of Montpellier. Technically, it could be ‘reclaimed’ by the municipality at any time.Footnote 71
The problem with this compromise was that it could easily be construed as a violation of the principles of French laïcité, especially since the 1905 legislation that enshrines the separation of Church and State prohibits state funding of places of worship. On paper, the Avicenna centre was a salle polyvalente but in practice it was one of the largest mosques in the country at the time. The paradox was all the more striking because, from the late 1980s until his death, Frêche loudly proclaimed his enthusiasm for French laïcité. In his books and interviews, he repeatedly argued for the benefits of republican integration over multiculturalism, and supported a ban on headscarves in school well before the legislation was actually passed.Footnote 72 But, as was so often the case, Frêche said different things to different audiences. Outside his fiefdom, he was the defender of the values of the Republic; at home, he was the patron of the Muslim community, selling his highly personalised brand of communautarisme. As he put it himself in 2002: ‘le représentant des Musulmans, il n’y en a qu’un, c’est moi! Il n’y a pas plus de communauté harkie que de communauté marocaine ou algérienne. Ici, ce n’est pas eux qui décident.’Footnote 73
By now, there was public criticism of Frêche's approach to the Muslim population in the local press but the mayor was undeterred. When the time came to build the next mosque in the heavily immigrant neighbourhood of La Paillade in 2003–4, it again came in the form of a salle polyvalente. This time, however, Frêche did not rely on Kathir Nedromi and his network of harkis. Instead, he turned his attention to the fastest-growing immigrant community in the city: the Moroccans. They had been arriving in large numbers since the 1980s. Between 2001 and 2006 alone, over 22% of the city's 11,300 foreign arrivals were Moroccans, a percentage that almost certainly underestimates the significant proportion of Franco-Moroccans who hold French passports and therefore do not figure in the statistics.Footnote 74 Most importantly, they were becoming major electoral players in Montpellier's western and northern constituencies. In the summer of 2000, a group of Moroccans joined the local Green Party and began intensive campaigning.Footnote 75 In the first round of municipal elections the following year, the Greens scored unprecedented results, with over 18% in the neighbourhoods around La Paillade.Footnote 76 Frêche had signed an electoral pact with the Greens and was therefore assured of victory in the second round. But he knew that he could no longer ignore a community that made up an estimated 10% of the city's electorate.Footnote 77
His solution was to co-opt the Association des Franco-Marocains around Lhoussine Tahri to run the newly opened Salle Polyvalente Averroes.Footnote 78 The latter were urged to campaign on behalf of the mayor amongst the Moroccan community. In return, the municipality gave thousands of euros in subsidies to both Nedromi and Tahri's associations. It was a highly successful strategy. Throughout the 2000s, there were regular protests by individuals and groups who were excluded from this special relationship but none were able to break it down, even when Frêche gave up his position as mayor to become president of the Languedoc-Roussillon region in 2004.Footnote 79 In part this was because Frêche remained as head of the city council, thereby ensuring that he would still be a potent local actor. But it was also because the majority of the protests were by groups of second- and third-generation French Muslims who could not draw on the Algerian or Moroccan networks of Nedromi and Tahri.
Paradoxically, the most sustained opposition to Frêche's management of Montpellier's Muslim community came not from disgruntled young Muslims but from the French courts. In 2006 a group of local councillors took the municipality to court for having signed an exclusive agreement with the Association des Franco-Marocains for use of the Salle Polyvalente Averroes as a mosque. They argued that such an agreement constituted public funding of a place of worship. In addition, the exclusive nature of the agreement violated the principles of religious neutrality and equality that were enshrined in the 1905 law. After lengthy deliberations, the administrative tribunal of Montpellier agreed with the plaintiffs and the municipality were told to annul the agreement. The tribunal's decision was subsequently upheld by the court of appeal in 2007. Eventually, the municipality took the issue to the highest administrative court in France, the Conseil d’État. In 2011, it decided to overturn the decisions of the lower courts. In its conclusions, the council argued that there were ‘doubts’ over the agreement the municipality had signed, but the balance of evidence suggested it was within the bounds of legality.Footnote 80
This remarkable decision was a clear, if posthumous, validation of Frêche. Not for the first time, he had tested the boundaries of the law and been vindicated. As he liked to remind people, he had been taken to court three times for defamation and discriminatory remarks (most famously in 2006 after the incident with the harkis) but on each occasion he was cleared. He dealt with the law in much the same way as he dealt with political opposition – by ignoring it and hoping it would go away. The fact that he left such a powerful and apparently unimpeachable legacy suggests that his instinct was correct. Montpellier has remained a bastion of the Socialist Party and is still run by a team of local councillors who owe their public existence to Frêche. Inevitably, there will be change: the strength of pied-noir activism has reduced and the pied-noir vote has fragmented.Footnote 81 It also seems likely that Nedromi's network of elderly harkis will soon be definitively supplanted by younger networks of Algerians and Moroccans. But the basic pattern of minority politics is unlikely to change: if it worked for Frêche, there is no reason it will not work for others.
More generally, the Conseil d’État's decision revealed the myriad ways in which local experiences have influenced national policy-making. One consequence of the lengthy and polemical headscarf debate is that laïcité has often been caricatured, especially outside France, as a repressive and fixed ideology imposed on individuals and local authorities by the omnipresent French state.Footnote 82 Yet, when given the option to annul a fait accompli or adapt the principles of laïcité to the specific case of the Salle Polyvalente Averroes, the Conseil d’État chose the latter. They were careful to clarify the rules governing any agreement between a municipality and a faith-based association (association culturelle), but they stopped short of demanding that the city of Montpellier terminate its practice of renting out halls for use as mosques. This kind of adaptation was not an unusual exception: the Conseil d’État heard four other cases at the same time and decided, in all of them, to reject literalist readings of the 1905 law in favour of a more flexible approach. The Conseil's overall concluding remarks emphasised this pragmatism: ‘l’équilibre auquel nous vous proposons de souscrire sera donc celui de la fidélité aux principes fondateurs de la loi de 1905, mais dans la prise en compte de ses nécessaires tempéraments’.Footnote 83 Had Frêche been around to hear the judgement, he would no doubt have congratulated himself. He always dreamed of having an impact on national policy-making but his poor relationship with Mitterrand meant that he was never offered a ministerial portfolio.Footnote 84 Instead, it was his unique political style that influenced others. The much-maligned ‘système Frêche’ showed that it was possible for communautarisme to exist – and be legally-validated – at the heart of the French Republic.
Montpellier: colony or postcolony?
For all his successes, there was one accusation that Frêche found difficult to shake off. His critics routinely claimed that his management of Montpellier's postcolonial minorities was ‘neo-colonial’. They argued that his co-optation of specific community leaders and his paternalist attitude towards Islam closely resembled France's colonial practices in North and West Africa. This was exacerbated by his susceptibility to a pied-noir narrative of benevolent colonialism and his noisy adherence to the principles of republican integration.Footnote 85 It is a compelling argument: one could easily claim that Frêche went from a rabble-rousing Maoist to a boisterous colonial administrator looking after his favoured ‘indigènes’ and marginalising all those who held opposing views. The problem with this view is that it ignores the very different political structures of the French empire and the postcolonial metropole. Frêche was not dealing with a population of ‘subjects’ but an amorphous and fickle electorate.Footnote 86 If he stopped winning elections, he was doomed to disappear. His calculation was that, as an outsider, he needed to build networks of support in order to sustain his politics. This was not a ‘neo-colonial’ strategy so much as an acknowledgement of the importance of minority politics in an ever-more decentralised France.
This becomes clear if we look beyond postcolonial minorities. For instance, Frêche developed strong links with Montpellier's influential Jewish community.Footnote 87 He became close friends with the charismatic community leader Joseph Bensoussan in the late 1970s and gave substantial material support to specifically Jewish projects. The municipality subsidised the creation of a dedicated Jewish local radio station (Radio Aviva) in 1982, financed a Jewish cultural centre (the Institut Maïmonide) in 2000, and contributed significant funds to the construction of a strictly kosher retirement home in 2009.Footnote 88 As in the case of the pieds-noirs, Frêche also marked himself out from the rest of his political party by repeatedly declaring his public support for the state of Israel.Footnote 89 When the controversy over Fabius's ‘tronche pas très catholique’ exploded and the national press branded Frêche an incorrigible anti-Semite, the city's Jewish community leaders were amongst the first to jump to his defence.Footnote 90 Likewise, the leaders of Montpellier's gay community refused to accept the increasingly negative outside interpretations of Frêche in the late 2000s. At the time of his death in 2010, they reminded journalists that he had been instrumental in supporting the gay and lesbian cause in the late 1970s. In the 1990s, he helped create the Aides and Envie associations and supported the inauguration of the Centre Gay et Lesbien de Montpellier in 1994.Footnote 91 By this time, Montpellier had become known as one of France's most gay-friendly cities and it was appropriate that the country's first ever gay marriage should have been held there in May 2013.Footnote 92 Once again, Frêche's posthumous legacy had significant political repercussions.
On closer examination, then, the argument that Frêche's minority politics was ‘neo-colonial’ provides only a very partial explanation of how he governed Montpellier from the late 1970s until the early 2000s. It would be more accurate to characterise his style as one of overlapping identity-based networks. Unlike Delmas, whose courting of minorities did not go much beyond his intimate relationship with the rapatriés, Frêche had an instinctive feel for identity politics. This is almost certainly because he entered professional politics at a time in the 1970s when it was flourishing amidst a vast expansion of civil society activism. The French decentralisation laws of the early 1980s and mid 2000s reinforced this tendency by giving greater political and economic power to local actors.Footnote 93 The result was a much more fragmented civil society and political space, in which traditional party allegiances broke down.
In these rapidly changing circumstances, a local potentate like Frêche could not rely solely on acquired political capital; he continuously had to renew and reassess the networks that supported him. This was especially true of a city like Montpellier where the far-right had the potential to take full advantage of any power vacuum: it was with good reason that Frêche repeatedly emphasised how he had ‘protected’ the city from the Front National. In many other neighbouring towns and cities, especially those with large pied-noir populations, the FN has regularly scored 20–30% in the past three decades. In Montpellier, it has rarely exceeded 15%. Frêche's instrumentalisation of identity politics was one of the key ways in which he held off the threat of the far-right. For all its corruption, the ‘système Frêche’ was more of a postcolonial survival strategy than an oppressive neo-colonial political arrangement. It was also forward-looking: with France becoming more diverse and more stratified, there will be many other local leaders trying to run their cities and regions in the way Frêche did. The question now is how long it will take for a French political culture that has long been hostile to expressions of difference to adapt to the realities of contemporary identity politics. With such staunch opposition to any kind of communautarisme, there is unlikely to be any dramatic shift. But Frêche showed that it is possible to marry high republican principles and grubby clientelism in the name of civic pride – and still triumph at the ballot box.
