“Et si Joséphine Baker entrait au Panthéon? / What If Josephine Baker Entered the Pantheon?” In 2013, this title of the philosopher Régis Debray's opinion piece in the newspaper Le monde was meant to be provocative, but it ended up being prescient. To the surprise of onlookers inside and outside France, on 23 August 2021 President Emmanuel Macron announced that indeed, Josephine Baker—an African American entertainer who subverted colonial tropes as she embodied them, a global anti-racist activist, and a heroine of the French Resistance during World War II—would be memorialized as a national hero in the Panthéon, one of the country's most hallowed patriotic mausoleums.
Reactions to Josephine Baker's panthéonisation (entry into the Panthéon) in print and conversation proffer a privileged insight into the stakes and structures of l'exception française, French exceptionalism. Debates on “the Baker issue” converge on the ideological bedrock of French exceptionalism: republican universalism and the spread of Enlightenment “progress” and the Revolutionary values of liberté, égalité, fraternité.Footnote 1 In a televised speech to the nation on 11 March 2007, the French president, Jacques Chirac, articulated the customary formulation that “France is a country unlike any other. It has special responsibilities inherited from its history and the universal values that it has helped to forge” (qtd. in Drake 187). While the jingoism, ideological suppositions, and whiff of white man's burden of this statement may seem outmoded and far-fetched, their historical and present power must not be underestimated.Footnote 2
How does Baker's immortalization in the Panthéon square with this national dogma and its constituent forms of domination? In positive political appraisals, some hope that it represents another important step in the process of reckoning for a country whose vociferous devotion to secular, color-blind universalism has relentlessly shouted down competing accounts of structural and cultural discrimination at the intersections of gender, race, class, religious affiliation, immigration status, sexuality, and ability or disability. Similarly, from a cultural standpoint, some see this moment as the syncretic apotheosis of universalism as it fuses with global postmodernism in this age of anti-racism and Black Lives Matter.Footnote 3
Others condemn Baker's entry into the Panthéon as the nadir of French exceptionalism, though their demurrals stem from opposing stances on the political spectrum. On the left, some view it as a most egregious manifestation of an instrumentalist “move to innocence,” which Janet Mawhinney defines as “strategies to remove involvement in and culpability for systems of domination” (17). In hopes of pacifying a citizenry that accuses its government of racisme d’État (state-perpetrated racism), the state now elevates Baker in a superficial palliative gesture by which it washes its hands of its slavery, colonialism, and neocolonial domination. More cynically still, other leftists see this as a racial capitalistic exploitation deployed by Macron for purely self-serving purposes as he works to boost his approval ratings and signal supposed French color-blindness in a reelection year. Those leaning toward or seated firmly on the right are no less incensed as they cling tightly to a traditional view of French political, socioeconomic, and cultural exceptionalism that they aver has been slipping away. Such individuals are alarmed to see what Tony Chafer and Emmanuel Godin describe in their introduction to The End of the French Exception? Decline and Revival of the “French Model” as the “French state increasingly forced to negotiate a passage between pressures ‘from above’ (globalisation, Europeanisation) and ‘from below’ (civil society, public opinion)” (10). Along these lines, Debray predicted the inevitable reactionary backlash to Joséphine Baker's becoming an official national hero: “From the Folies Bergère cabaret to the supreme sanctuary? From the banana skirt to the laurel wreath? Profanation!” Such complainants would agree with the businessman and former state social affairs adviser Raymond Soubie's 1991 exhortation against the “banalization” of France and end of (a certain) “French model”: “have we fallen into line, after our loss of power, of our illusions, and a part of our soul? Are we condemned to be a middle-size nation like any other? Is God still French?” (qtd. in Collard 23).
The question is not whether God is still French but whether the French can still play God. In order to rethink French exceptionalism, I argue that we must retheorize it ontologically, genealogically, and structurally. This means interrogating l'exception française as a discursive phenomenon in the contemporary context, but also historicizing it as a mental construct and praxis. In this, I contend that exceptionalism is fundamentally coextensive with empire, an existential imbrication that Edward Said long ago affirmed in Orientalism and to which Chirac's statement faintly alludes. If, as Achille Mbembe has claimed, postcolonial studies “examine the work accomplished by the categories of race, gender, and sexuality in colonial imaginaries and seek to evaluate their role in the very process of producing colonial subjects” (86), I submit that we must consider these same categories and others to shed light on the often stealthily obfuscated negative space of colonial subjection—the production of Frenchness and its professed exceptionalities.
L'Exception Française: A Discursive House of Cards?
Discussions of France's uniqueness, and ostensible superiority, have centered on socioeconomic, political, and cultural spheres. Socioeconomically, France's prioritization of social welfare and solidarity quadrate with the nation's putative position against globalization and “the ravages of liberalisation à l'anglo-saxonne” (Chafer and Godin, Introduction 4; see also Milner). Politically, “the notion of the French exception has its roots in a distinctive republican model, attaching central importance to the prestige of the State, the primacy of politics and the active propagation, at home and worldwide, of certain values that are perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be enlightened and progressive” (9). Within France, this has translated to the persistence of the Napoleonic code and assimilationist policy that “only recognises individuals and not communities within the nation-state. Thus the existence of minority groups, whether religious, ethnic, regional, or linguistic, is not acknowledged” (9). Culturally, “apart from the pervasive and—to the French at least, attractive—idea that French culture is somehow inherently ‘superior,’” writes Hugh Dauncey, France's notions of cultural exceptionalism are founded on a “privileged relationship with a voluntarist and culturally interventionist State, which promotes and encourages culture” with both internal subsidies and external protections (72). This state-driven cultural enterprise dates back to the sixteenth century, with the cultivation and promulgation of the French language standing at the epicenter of the construct of prestige from the reign of King François I (1515–47), to Cardinal Richelieu's founding of the Académie Française, in 1635, to Macron's ambitious neocolonialist linguistic “Francophonie” program aiming to make French surpass English as a world language by 2050.Footnote 4
Familiar to many, these tenets of French exceptionalism—which like all such contentions are born of hierarchical thinking, competition and domination, uneven application, and selective memory—beg to be assessed and contested. And they have been.Footnote 5 A deep and equally familiar tradition of francophone artistic production and transversal anthropological, feminist, and postcolonial critique has harmonized with voices of the Frankfurt school and others to unpack and challenge the edifice of French exceptionalism.Footnote 6 Together, these critiques posited what I would characterize as a rhizomatic epistemology à la Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Édouard Glissant, eschewing Eurocentric atavism and the French exceptionalist monolith by insisting on principles of multiperspectivalism, heterogeneity, and interconnectivity.Footnote 7 Unsurprisingly, the French state and proponents of l'exception française perceive these perspectives as a threat and try to suppress them in what Mbembe calls an “imperial winter”: “a series of disconnections, anathemas, and grand excommunications that culminated in the relative provincialization of French thought and its regression on a planetary scale” (87). In this French version of “postcolonial melancholia,” the state joins forces with certain public intellectuals and members of the French academy to mount counterattacks designed to undermine the legitimacy of artistic productions and critical research (especially critical race theory and before that postcolonial studies).Footnote 8 These reactionaries not only strategically foster “a stark provincialism of the knowledge produced and disseminated in the Hexagon,” as Mbembe has noted, but foment a discourse of political emergency and cultural crisis, painting a chimera of the French nation infiltrated by individuals imputed to be terrorists, wayward Americanophiles, “Islamo-gauchistes” (Islamo-leftists), or some other phantasmagorical moniker (87). I shall return to this question of the state of emergency shortly.
Despite political and institutional headwinds, in the past ten years, research by sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians has joined the work of philosophers, creative writers, artists, and filmmakers to expand the narrative countering French exceptionalism. The first group includes Abdellali Hajjat and Marwane Mohammed's book Islamophobie: Comment les élites françaises fabriquent le “problème musulman” (Islamophobia: How the French Elites Fabricate the “Muslim Problem”), which was the first major analysis of Islamophobia in France, from its historical precedents in French colonialism and anti-Semitism to its current-day discourses, cultures, and related policies of state-sponsored racism against French Muslims.Footnote 9 Hajjat and Mohammed uncovered state maneuvers to engender a “national consensus” construing the idea of Islam and the presence of Muslims in France as a “problem.” Pap Ndiaye's La condition noire: Essai sur une minorité française (The Black Condition: Essay on a French Minority) was a similar watershed work concerning the racialization and minoritization of African-descended peoples in France and is viewed by many as a founding work of modern Black French studies. In her 2019 study Identités françaises: Banlieues, féminités et universalisme (French Identities: Suburbs, Femininities, and Universalism), Mame-Fatou Niang advanced this intellectual project by studying the minoritization and exclusion from Frenchness of communities of color, especially African-descended women, in representations of the grandes banlieues—neighborhoods of chiefly (and poorly) state-subsidized housing where many such communities reside.Footnote 10 Crossing class boundaries, Jean Beaman's 2017 ethnographic study Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France was the first to examine educated, middle-class second-generation French citizens of North African descent fixing on their “experience as an ethnic minority, including the processes embedded within that experience, in a national context that does not recognize minorities based on ethnic origin or have a language or framework for making sense of them.”Footnote 11 In adopting this methodology, Beaman took aim at l'exception française. Her research “lay to rest the notion of a French exceptionalism regarding distinctions based on race and ethnicity,” demonstrating “how a population that is legally and technically French is not considered culturally French, and is therefore excluded from popular imaginations of who a French person is” (4).
Since the new millennium, critiques have increasingly attended to the varied dimensions of what Elsa Dorlin aptly labeled the “matrix of race” as a foundational force in the French empire and nation.Footnote 12 In the past decade especially, scholars have advanced granular analyses of French slavery; colonial and neocolonial abuses (Joseph-Gabriel; Johnson; Daughton); Haiti and the Haitian Revolution (Daut; Popkin; Dubois; Sepinwall, Haitian History); whiteness (Stovall, White Freedom); gender, anti-Blackness, and the legacies of chattel slavery (Keaton et al.; Mitchell; Vergès; Fleming; Germain and Larcher); urban minoritized populations in cities like Marseille (Nasiali); and the “ambiguous citizenship” of French citizens of continental France, the Antilles, former colonies, and overseas France (Thomas, Africa and France, Noirs d'encre; Niang; Hajjat; Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, Undesirable; Cain; Saada; Marker, “Obscuring Race” and Black France; Semley; Celestine; Larcher; Soumahoro; Davis). Among artistic productions, Caroline Guiela Nguyen's 2017 play Saigon, Bintou Dembélé's celebrated 2019 critical choreography of Jean-Philippe Rameau's eighteenth-century colonialist opera Les Indes galantes, and Afro-feminist documentaries by Amandine Gay, Isabelle Boni-Claverie, and Mame-Fatou Niang and Kaytie Nielsen show “France's need” not only “to tell its story from beyond its own frontiers” (“Saigon”) but also to tell homegrown stories that French exceptionalism leaves out.
In aggregate, these works and many others remove, through reductio ad absurdum, the shiny veneer of French exceptionalism, showing it to be, as Helen Drake appositely put it, “a strategic edifice whose foundations have stiffened into a discursive house of cards, and whose exceptionalism is very much in the eye of the beholder” (201). It would be erroneous, however, to reduce French exceptionalism to the discursive realm alone. The phenomenon is far more ontologically complex.Footnote 13 A more substantive theorization engages the interconnected dimensions in which it unfolds as a psychological construct, social pathology, and political praxis whose primary modality can be found in the Latin root of the word itself: exceptio, from excipere, “to take out.”
Racecraft, Exceptio, and States of Exception
In the genealogy of French exceptionalism, the first thing metaphorically excised from a broader body for the purpose of differentiation was, of course, France or Frenchness itself. Specialists of the early modern era have elucidated the ways in which French elites worked to construct a grand, independent, even essentialist identity for France—geographically, politically, intellectually, culturally, and linguistically.Footnote 14 This undertaking did not unfold in a European bubble. Scholars have unearthed the ways that French identity and notions of superiority were cobbled together in an orientalist manner in direct relation to conceptualizations and policy making regarding chattel slavery, colonization, global trade, and war.Footnote 15 The language, values, and policies of French refinement and order associated with neoclassicism and absolutism were created in the seventeenth century and then expanded during the eighteenth century in order to ensure French domination over any number of peoples fantastically fashioned as Others—Indigenous peoples in North America and the Caribbean, “Turks,” Jews, Muslims, enslaved Africans, South Asians, and more.
This othering is a form of what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields term “racecraft”: an operation by which derogatory ideations of essentialized difference are concocted then deployed as a smoke screen to simultaneously disguise and justify domination and oppression. As such, it is racism—understood as a set of discriminatory social, civic, and legal practices—that produces the social construct and supporting discourses of race. In Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Fields and Fields write that this “transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss” (17).Footnote 16
The cognitive process of racecraft must be underscored as a part of how French exceptionalism operates. The fervent insistence on the “problematic” differences of racialized Others acts on two self-reflexive levels. First, it powerfully exculpates the perpetrator(s) since it displaces the logical emphasis away from their own actions and toward the alleged faults of the victim(s), providing justification for racialized abuses. At the same time, this hierarchical framework elevates the self-image of the perpetrator(s) in any number of ways—morally, physically (including sexually), and so on. This psychological move attending racist discrimination operates at individual and collective levels, forming a social pathology. Could there be more salient examples than the prevalent discourse by which white colonists and slaveholders blamed their serial raping of mixed-race women on what Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry referred to as these women's seductive nature and erotic “cult” (81–82)? Or slavers describing the servile nature of the African enslaved? Need we state that these mixed-race women were often the result of the rape of Black women by white men or that white slavers could not speak to the (implausible) servile temperament of the enslaved until after enslaving them? The temporal disorder hiding behind these claims makes clear that legal and cultural structures surrounding chattel slavery, ones that treated sentient human beings as what Hortense Spillers refers to as “flesh,” predated these articulations.
This process cannot be simplified as a unidimensional phenomenon of discourse or speech act lest we lose track of the political praxis that precedes it. Labeling people as culturally, racially, and morally anathema was part of a tautological system that justified already-in-motion policies and practices that accomplished a dual movement of inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, they ensured that the labor (including sexual and reproductive labor) of the othered could be brought into and made to profit the empire. On the other hand, they shut out the othered from being “French” or from accessing the rights, privileges, and dignity associated with “Frenchness,” an endeavor enacted through myriad forms of degradation, annihilation, or assimilation (often another form of annihilation).Footnote 17 This configuration is a clear and most extreme precursor to the status of the “citizen outsider” that Beaman examines as well as the experience of millions of colonized peoples in the former and current French empire.
If, as our structural analysis reveals, policies of domination and oppression in support of France's global empire were key drivers in the building of French exceptionalism, it is imperative to trace their roots and urgency back into colonial spaces.Footnote 18 It was in frigid forests of the Omàmiwinini and Wyandot nations that the dwindling French colonist population imagined a policy of assimilation that would convert and Frenchify Indigenous peoples during the seventeenth century. It was in the tropics of Haiti (then Saint-Domingue)—where the enslaved (eighty-nine percent) and free colored (five percent) populations dwarfed that of white French colonists (six percent)—that the most flagrant racialized exclusions and fantastical racial categorizations took root. It was from this underlying sense of alarm and insecurity in their would-be domination, the constant state of emergency on the part of colonists and slavers in these spaces at critical moments, that draconian methods and mentalities came into being. The racecraft that structured French exceptionalism in its early instantiations was born of an Agambenian state of exception that “marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference” (Agamben 40).Footnote 19 In this formulation, violence and oppression precede discourse.
The dynamics of crisis and authoritarianism of the state of exception traveled from the colonial frontiers back to the metropole and forward through history. This is evident in a plethora of examples such as the grossly exaggerated claim in 1762 by Guillaume Poncet de la Grave (the king's representative to the Admiralty court) that “a deluge of negroes appeared in France” and that “there is not a bourgeois or a worker who doesn't have his negro slave.” Poncet de la Grave attributed the “deluge” to ineffective, unregistered laws controlling the transport of enslaved people to France (qtd. in Peabody 72). This claim, and others like it, must be fact-checked. While there was an increase in the Black population in France in 1762—Peabody reports that 159 individuals were registered in Paris that year compared with no more than thirty in any other year between 1738 and 1776 (72)—this was hardly a “deluge,” and the numbers were still infinitesimally small. In a French population in the environs of twenty million in the mid–eighteenth century, historians estimate that Black people totaled around five thousand, roughly 0.025% of the population (Peabody 4). Yet this state-of-emergency discourse regarding the Black presence in France had its effect: the Paris Admiralty tightened its fist by creating even more comprehensive criteria for controlling the movement of Black bodies in France. Instead of targeting the enslaved, the ordinance adopted a broad phenotypic language of race encompassing all people of color, enslaved or free, who were to be tracked. This cycle repeated in 1777, culminating in the passing of the Police des Noirs (“Policing of Blacks”) edict.
Analogous phenomena—too many to be listed and more still to be brought to light—have been pursued throughout French history ensuring the exclusion of those excepted from French exceptionalism.Footnote 20 L'exception française cannot be understood as divorced from these processes.
Conclusion: Josephine Baker, Cultural Appropriation, and Franco-American Exceptionalisms
In her 2020 book Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell argues that the French have long defined themselves in opposition to fantasies of Black women, individuals “such as Josephine Baker both acting as an exotic Other and highlighting the foreignness of any black body within the French body politic” (16). My analyses in this essay clearly support this statement. Yet, on 30 November 2021, Josephine Baker was interred in the Panthéon as a national heroine. Prima facie, this may cause some to say that Mitchell's comment and my own arguments have been proven wrong. However, the reality is far more complex from the perspectives of both French exceptionalism and comparative exceptionalism, in this case Franco-American.
First, it is clear that the structural elements of l'exception française are fully operative in Baker's panthéonisation. A “citizen outsider,” her valiant service to France and her sexualized image are once again consumed and instrumentalized by the nation and she, long dead, never lived a full sense of inclusion into normative Frenchness during her lifetime. What is more, it is more than a little bit eyebrow-raising that Macron chose Baker, whom Jennifer Boittin refers to as “a safe version of the other” (Colonial Metropolis 3) and whose political valence is less threatening than that of great Black and Brown French citizens like Paulette Nardal and Jeanne Nardal or, dare I say, Frantz Fanon (“Profanation!”). It is remarkable that in 2021, mainstream French politicians and sanctioned narrators of French history are still so excluding of the country's own minoritized citizenry that they would prefer to enshrine an American expatriate tenuously adopted through marital naturalization. With this in mind, and given the political context, it is tempting to view Baker's entry into the Panthéon as an archetypal “move to innocence,” a spectacular papering over of past and present racecraft, from the lived and historiographical oppression of figures like the Nardal sisters and the refusal to make reparations to Haiti, to current-day fabulations regarding “Islamo-gauchisme.” By invoking the latter false concept through the modality of the state of exception—especially following the murder of the French teacher Samuel Paty in 2020—members of Macron's administration are broadly targeting (again) Muslims in France, the political opposition on the left, and any intellectuals and educators who are engaged in the study of race or who have otherwise been pointing to the unsavory hypocrisies and failures of l'exception française.Footnote 21
Furthermore, analyzing this moment through the framework of comparative exceptionalisms reveals the convolutions of their relationality and possible (co)operationalization. From the vantage point of mutualism, French and American exceptionalisms have been declaredly coconstitutive since the first republics of both nations, the French having supplied a full complement of support to the (white, male, elite) American causes of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” during the War of Independence (1775–83). For centuries and for the purpose of pursuing conjointly beneficial imperial interests, France and the United States have deployed the public image of Franco-American friendship in exceptionalism as beacons of freedom in the world. These nations have long conspired to make sure that the symbolic instantiations of their shared exceptionalism—the Statue of Liberty, American landings on the beaches of Normandy in World War II, and so on—dominate national political imaginaries far more than the darker sides of their imperial alliance, especially in foreign interventionism that includes the Vietnam Wars (1946–75) and the backing of the recently deceased former dictator of Chad, Hissène Habré, convicted of crimes against humanity in 2016. The panthéonisation of Josephine Baker could be seen as another sanitizing celebration of Franco-American exceptionalism and a friendly act of cultural appropriation by which France tips its hat to the American-born Black Lives Matter movement (while conveniently ignoring parallel French activism), thereby bolstering the cultural and political capital of both nations and perhaps even healing French-American political ties after the destructive years of Trump's presidency. Alternatively, rather than signaling respect, the state could be seen to be smugly asserting the superiority of French exceptionalism over that of the United States, recalling that African American intellectuals, soldiers, and artists like Baker who suffered under racist policy and culture of the Jim Crow era in the United States found freedom in the French republic during the twentieth century.Footnote 22 Uplifted as a heroine of France, Baker becomes proof that French “liberté, égalité, fraternité” stands supreme and encompasses the world over, transcending racial, gender, and national lines with its purported color-blindness and universalism.
However, if we leave these political machinations aside to embrace Baker's panthéonisation through the lens of her own agency, we might say she would have the last laugh. Baker lived firsthand the hypocrisies of both French and American exceptionalisms and boldly paved a path toward triumphing over them both. It was, after all, her strategy to leave segregated America for France in order to escape the deadly intersectional oppressions of the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” So, too, was it her strategy in Paris to fashion herself as what Boittin calls a “colonial woman”—a “primitive” turned grande dame embodying the potential for success of the French civilizing mission—so that she could cement her career and place in France (Colonial Metropolis 1). Judging by her outstanding life achievements for which she deserves recognition, from her days at the Folies Bergère to her entry into the Panthéon in November 2021, her strategy worked.
