Redrawing of French “Régions” to Buoy Right-Wing Normans but Stoke Breton, Basque, and Savoyard Anger

There is a world of difference between France’s new Socialist president, François Hollande, and his rightward-tilting, law-and-order predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.  But there is one thing at least that both seem to agree on: Hollande decided this month to revisit plans developed under Sarkozy to reduce the number of France’s constituent régions.  Hollande would like to see 15 régions, down from the current 22 (not counting overseas régions in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean, which make for a total of 27).

Hollande takes aim at anyone expressing regional pride

To redraw the map, Sarkozy, in 2008, had commissioned Édouard Balladur, a fellow conservative who had been François Mitterand’s prime minister in the 1990s, to proposes reforms to France’s governmental structures.  Though Hollande has not yet said how he wants the 15 régions to be organized, his party’s backing of the number 15 suggests a close hewing to the Balladur proposal.

Édouard Balladur and Nicolas Sarkozy cooking up reforms (careful—Bretons can read lips!).

It should be said here that France’s régions are not a big deal in the way that Italy’s or Spain’s regions are.  Many Spanish and Italian regions have devolved legislatures, even fully autonomous status.  France, on the other hand, is one of the most centralized states in the Western democratic world.  The départements—tiny collectivities much like counties in the United States—are the most significant level of local government, but the régions have no legislative authority but merely spend some education and infrastructure funds in accordance with decisions made at higher levels of government.  These régions were created only in 1982.  The original 40 or so provinces of pre-revolutionary France corresponded in many cases to strong regional and ethnic identities, but when, in the 1790s, the French nobility was abolished, so were the various duchies and other petty monarchies they governed.  The départements were designed specifically to be small enough to prevent regional identities from asserting themselves.  The Napoleonic interregna were similarly hostile to anything that challenged a centralized French national identity.

The French Republic, let us recall, has one of the worst records on the treatment of minorities of any Western democracy.  The French Revolution practically invented modern nationalist chauvinism as we know it, and the government doesn’t let their minorities forget it.  Official recognition of any minority language is constitutionally forbidden.  Breton and Basque citizens of the republic still recall being savagely beaten in state-run schools for uttering a mere word of their native languages.  France has some of the free world’s most restrictive laws against wearing religious clothing—laws blatantly crafted to punish and marginalize the country’s Muslims and Jews.  Gypsies are routinely rousted from their encampments by police thugs before being deported, with a brutality that alarms human-rights organizations.  And the openly racist National Front (Front nationale, or F.N.) political party is stronger in France than equivalent anti-immigrant hate parties in any other western European country.  France, as we all know, is a nice place to live—but really only if you’re French.  (See recent articles from this blog on sectarian frictions in Sarkozy’s France and on equivalent abuses in Québécois nationalism in Canada (plus a follow-up).)

Sarkozy goose-stepped his way into the hearts of French xenophobe voters.

When the régions were created in 1982, some pre-revolutionary provinces, such as Franche-Comté, Alsace, Lorraine, Brittany, and Burgundy, were reincarnated as régions, while others were not: Normandy was now split between Upper Normandy and Lower Normandy, while Poitou was absorbed into a larger region, Languedoc and Roussillon were merged, and others, like Anjou, Lyonnais, and Marche were left buried.  In 2010, activists in Picardy had to raise a stink to avoid the abolition of their region altogether.

The French régions as they are today

No scheme pleases everybody, but top-down schemes, which characterize the way nearly everything of this sort is done in France, please fewest of all, and the Balladur map, if implemented, will be not much of an exception.  Here is what the Balladur plan would look like:

First, the winners.  Normans were the most vocally disenfranchised—or, let’s say, explicitly not re-enfranchised—by the 1982 reforms.  Surely this has something to do with the Second World War.  Normans, after all—snug against Flanders and across the English Channel from Britain—speak a dialect full of Scandinavian and other Germanic idioms and feel a particular kinship with England.  Every English schoolboy knows that his kingdom’s history only truly picks up the pace with the Norman Conquest of 1066.  Queen Elizabeth II, as monarch, holds also the ceremonial title Duchess of Normandy, signifying her suzerainty over the crown dominions of Jersey and Guernsey—the only remaining places where the old Norman language is spoken—while the right-wing English Democrats party, which seeks England’s exit from the United Kingdom (discussed recently in this blog), waves the triple-lion flag of Normandy at its rallies.  Then, in the 1960s, France’s greater economic integration with Germany as founding members of the European Common Market (precursor to today’s European Union) disgruntled Norman nationalists in France, who felt their ties with the U.K. (which did not join until 1973) weakened in favor of ties with the much less well liked Germans to their southeast.  Most Normans, like most Scandinavians, had reacted coolly to Nazi Germany’s attempt to woo them during the war as “fellow Aryans.”  But Normans were more specifically anti-German than anti-fascist: the radical Norman Movement (Mouvement normand) of the 1960s, had a distinctly right-wing tilt which emphasized their Teutonicness, if not specifically Germanness (much like the way in which northern Italy’s right-wing Northern League (Lega Nord) clings to the attenuated historical “Nordicness” of the Lombard people).  The movement’s leader, Didier Patte, was convicted in the 1970s of running guns to Breton terrorists (more on the Bretons below).  Surely, in 1982, Normandy was left partitioned as a way of ensuring that a distinctly un-French regional identity did not rise again.

Likewise with Alsace–Lorraine, an even more culturally Germanic part of France which has spent about as much time under German dominion as under French in the modern period.  They were left as two regions, Alsace and Lorraine, perhaps for fear that uniting them as Alsace–Lorraine would reawaken proud memories of the short-lived Republic of Alsace–Lorraine, a Soviet-sympathizing workers’s state which existed for 12 defiant days in 1918 in the chaos of the end of the First World War.  The Balladur plan would reunify both Normandy and Alsace–Lorraine.  After all, the war was far in the past now, and, after all, it was important for Sarkozy to court the votes of supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Nazi-sympathizing founder of the National Front.  Indeed, Alsace First! (Alsace d’abord! / Elsaß zuerst!), the main Alsatian nationalist party (Lotharingians have always felt more French than Alsatians), has itself come under criticism for being far too right-wing and anti-immigrant.

Completely ignored in the Balladur plan are the interests of the Basque people of Pyrenées-Atlantique département in the région of Aquitania and of the small number of Catalans in Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur région on the Mediterranean.  Clearly, the French government regards these ethnic groups’ ties with larger and more autonomous communities of radical separatist kindred just over the border in Spain to be a security threat.  The terrorist group Basque Homeland and Freedom (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA) has been a major force mostly in Spain but has killed innocent people in France as well, while the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, or E.R.C.) political party is the king-making junior partner in the fragile ruling separatist coalition in Spain’s autonomous region of Catalonia, seeking not only full independence for Catalonia but reunification with the “Northern Catalonia” region just over the Pyrenees in France.  So no surprises there in the Balladur map, though it might not be wise to take up this issue in 2014 as both Catalan and Basque nationalism in Spain are cresting as never before, threatening to unravel the kingdom itself.

Members of the Basque nationalist group ETA.  Something tells me they’re not moderates.

Savoy is another problem area.  It used to be a powerful independent duchy, with a capital at Turin and territory that included a large swath including what are now southeastern France, northwestern Italy, and much of francophone Switzerland, Savoy was always at least as Italian as it was French.  It became part of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1714, then was taken over by France after the Revolution, then given to the Kingdom of Sardinia after Napoleon’s fall in 1815, then retaken by Napoleon III in 1860, which modern Savoyard nationalists still call an illegal, secret deal.  In fact, when the Kingdom of Italy was established soon after, the House of Savoy became the royal family of all Italy.  Even today, residents of the two French départements of Savoie and Haute-Savoie, abutting Italy and Switzerland, speak a group of Frenchish–Italianish dialects which are sometimes called a separate language, Arpitan.  This is also spoken in Geneva and in Italy’s fully autonomous francophone region, Val d’Aosta, just over the border in the Alps, where there is a popular movement to reunify with their kindred in an independent Savoy Republic.  Savoyard nationalism is very active in French Savoy itself.  Not only is there a Savoy Region Movement (Mouvement Région Savoie, or M.R.S.), which seeks a separate région of Savoy, but there is also a political party called I Believe in the Savoy Region! (La Région Savoie, j’y crois!), which wants a fully autonomous Savoy with a devolved autonomous parliament—in addition to the Savoyard League (Ligue savoisienne), which has set up a provisional government-in-exile in Geneva.  A poll in 2000 found a quarter of respondents in the two Savoy départements wanting to be an independent state, while a full half wanted an autonomous region.  In 2010, 48% of Savoyards liked the idea of Savoie and Haute-Savoie becoming Swiss cantons, and a whopping 43.7% of all Swiss and 55.9% of French-speaking Swiss agreed.  In that Swiss survey, the question also included the annexation of Franch–Comté, a région to the north, along the Swiss–French–German border which would also, incidentally, be obliterated in the Balladur plan and merged with Burgundy.  Why Hollande wants to kick awake the sleeping giant of Savoyard nationalism by producing yet another map that denies their existence and keep them barricaded from the Italian and Swiss citizens they regard as kindred is beyond me.

Savoyard nationalists protest at a Swiss border crossing

The most anger, however, over the Balladur plan has been generated in Brittany, where the Balladur suggestion of attaching Pays-de-la-Loire région’s Loire-Atlantique département to Brittany has been popular, but not at all the suggestion of merging Brittany with all of Pays-de-la-Loire into a single region.  This is regarded, quite rightly, as designed to dilute Breton regional identity and make the establishment of a Breton autonomous region even less likely than it already is.  (And it is unlikely; France doesn’t “do” autonomous regions.)  The nationalist Breton Democratic Union (Union Démocratique Bretonne, or U.D.B.), a left-wing, sometimes radically left-wing party, has been especially forceful on this point.

This is a bad time to alienate Breton nationalists.  At a time when Scotland is planning a referendum on independence for later this year, Welsh and Cornish nationalism (see my recent article) are becoming more strident, and even the Celtic nation of Galicia is only agreeing to stay within the Kingdom of Spain because the current Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy Brey, is himself Galician—at such a time, this is not when you want to needlessly piss off a bunch of radical Celts when you could just as well leave things be.  But the insular mindset of French nationalism chauvinism sort of doesn’t even “get” what regional and ethnic pride are; why, after all, would anyone want to not be French?  As the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy unravel all around them, François Hollande may be the next European leader to get a rough lesson in what the new European ethnoscape is shaping up to be.  Good luck with that map-redrawing business, Monsieur Président.  Tell us how it works out for you.

[You can read more about Bretons, Basques, and other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Toulouse Shooting Spree Deepens France’s Divisions

The shooting spree at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, this week and then the revelation that the gunman, who was eventually killed in a police stand-off, was a Muslim named Mohammed Merah came as terrible news to nearly everyone.  To Jews in France and worldwide, the confirmation of the suspicions that the killings of three children and a rabbi were motivated by radical Islam and anti-Semitism must have been sickening.  To Muslims in France, the news meant that soon there would probably be a backlash against France’s Muslim minority, already the targets of widespread prejudice.  For anyone in France, of any heritage, that values peace, tolerance, pluralism, and understanding between religious and cultural groups, this was a tragedy afflicting not only the families of the victims but the society as a whole.  But there was one group in France that had reason to celebrate the news that these heinous acts could be put under the heading of “Islamic terrorism”: the campaign team working to re-elect Nicolas Sarkozy in next week’s presidential elections.

Location of Toulouse, France

For months, Sarkozy had been polling badly against his Socialist oppenent, François Hollande.  Then, earlier this month, he decided to take a different tack.  Hollande was capturing the center, so the only place Sarkozy had to go to find new votes was on the far right.  He began engaging in angry, anti-immigrant, nationalistic rhetoric that is traditionally the trademark of the anti-Semitic, racist, neo-fascist National Front party.  For Sarkozy, who sailed to the presidency in 2007 on a campaign promise to “power-hose the scum out of the ghettoes,” this strategy was quite congenial to him.  First, he threatened to withdraw France from the European Union’s passport-free zone if Italy did not shut the door more firmly on refugees from Libya, Syria, and elsewhere amid the ongoing Arab Spring revolutions.  Next (as reported on in this blog last week), Sarkozy whipped up anti-Muslim feeling with a shamefully disingenuous concocted scandal over French butchers selling halal meat to non-Muslims.  (Halal is the Muslim equivalent of kosher and requires ritual slaughter of animals that sometimes includes procedures otherwise criminalized as inhumane.  Some butchers in France slaughter all their animals according to halal rules to save the costs of two separate production lines.)  Ah, yes, Sarkozy the long-time animal-rights advocate.  Anyway, it all worked.  Sarkozy’s poll numbers spiked, even exceeding Hollande’s in some surveys.

Nicolas Sarkozy, born-again animal-rights champion

When the Toulouse shootings occurred on March 19th, it must have been a nervous moment for Sarkozy’s reelection campaign.  Would the killer turn out to be some ethnically-French National Front wacko out to kill Jewish children?  Would it be someone who, once caught, would spout hysterical, anti-minority, jingoistic phrases lifted from Sarkozy’s speeches?  No, it was a Muslim.  Whew.

Nicolas Sarkozy

We still know little about Merah.  Raised in France by a single mother from Algeria, he turned to petty crime in his teens, then was exposed to Islamist extremism in prison (as if any more demonstration were needed that disproportionately heavy sentences imposed on Muslim youth in France actually feed terrorism).  Suspicious-looking trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan put him on the United States’ “no fly” list and made him a target of official French surveillance as well.  He bragged of links to al-Qaeda, which may or may not have been just bluster since, if nothing else, he was clearly deeply mentally disturbed.  In any case, the horrors of the shootings (Merah had also killed three French soldiers of Algerian extraction) fit neatly into the prevailing narrative of Sarkozy’s campaign, and increasingly of center-right politics in Europe more generally.  I guarantee the next polls will show Sarkozy ahead.  And he may just win.

Mohammed Merah

At least one European politician tried to change the narrative, but in a regrettably ham-fisted way, and the resulting controversy just adds to the general air of division in European society.  On March 19th, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, an English peeress who is the E.U.’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy—i.e., in one sense, western Europe’s highest-ranking foreign-policy voice—said, “When we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and different parts of the world—we remember young people and children who lose their lives.”  At one level, those remarks can be read as an attempt to put this Muslim-on-Jewish violence in a wider, human context that transcends specific groups, by invoking Islamophobically motivated Christian-on-Christian violence (Norway), Muslim-on-Muslim violence (Syria), and Jewish-on-Muslim violence (Gaza).  However, Lady Ashton ought to have known better.  The public seized on the implicit equation between Merah’s terrorist, anti-Semitic killing spree and Israeli Defense Forces (I.D.F.) soldiers who inadvertently kill Palestinian children—though usually as a predictable collateral effect of the I.D.F.’s aggressive forays into Palestinian civilian areas (including, earlier this month, as reported in this blog, two Gaza teenagers killed by Israeli bombs aimed at Islamic Jihad assassins).

Baroness Ashton of Upholland.

How do you translate “Open mouth, insert foot” into 27 different languages?

Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s right-wing, hawkish prime minister, was quick to seize on the remarks, condemning what he saw as an equation of “intentional massacre of children and an execution-style killing of an 8-year-old with the I.D.F.’s defensive and surgical actions meant to harm terrorists who use children as human shields.”  Netanyahu was right to pick up on a disturbing undercurrent in Ashton’s remarks, whether intended or not.  Progressive political opinion in Europe (Ashton is from the United Kingdom’s Labour Party) has shifted strongly toward sympathy with Palestine in the past couple decades, and this has nudged awake some dormant anti-Semitism in western Europe and dovetailed with not-so-dormant anti-Semitism in eastern Europe.  Some European politicians, in a kind of diplomatic version of Tourette’s syndrome, just can’t stop themselves from casting every atrocity against Jews anywhere in the “context” of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians—with an unnerving “they’re asking for it” subtext.  Some, sickeningly, even do this when talking about the Holocaust.

Binyamin Netanyahu

Nonetheless, it’s a sad fact that, at a moment when the Israeli Prime Minister should be able to speak to the world as the conscience of the Jewish people on a day of tragedy, he was instead so easily maneuvered into ascending a podium to defend the killing of children.  (Still, if you have to get someone to defend the killing of children, Bibi is definitely the man for the job.  He has lots of practice.)

No one knows what the social and political repercussions of the shootings will eventually be.  The vast majority of Europeans and Middle Easterners regard the crimes as horrifying, inexplicable, and an occasion for mourning, impotent anger, and sad reflection.  But so far, of those who have grabbed the microphone to politicize this tragedy, no one looks good.  No one.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]