Image by Miss Blackflag via FlickrA part of the French experience that doesn't surface in the books and articles about France, but I think it underlies what we, foreigners, might class as discrimination, as we see it only from what happens to ourselves, without a wider picture.
I have been brought to thinking about this by reading a discussion about discrimination on the Survive France network, then an item on Marilyn Z Tomlins' blog about the assault on an autistic child by his classmates and...at a side angle... by a post from A Year Down the Line about something which may or may not turn out to be a problem.
A participant in the Survive France discussion, Sarah Hague, who has a super blog at St. Bloggie de Riviere, made the point that you are all right in France until the moment you stick your neck out at which point the knives come out too and I think she is right, but I also think it reaches across the whole of French society, not just, as was the focus of the Survive France discussion, in relation to the French reaction to foreigners.
Before I start, do just bear in mind that my experience of France has been garnered from living out in the sticks and what I say will necessarily reflect that experience, though from the little I've seen of the urban beaufs and bobonnes they seemed pretty similar to their rural counterparts.
Neither am I in any way a social scientist, so what follows is purely anecdotal.
Talking to French friends' children, especially those working in the private sector, the amount of harassment and bullying in the workplace related by them would not be tolerated in the U.K.....yes, just as in the U.K. there is legal resource to combat this, but there is a culture of resignation.
That's how things are.
If you're lucky enough to have a job, then you just shut up or get out....
The pressures can be appalling and the results tragic, as in the case of the multiple suicides at France Telecom, but that is the workplace culture.
Bullying.
The union structure in France does nothing to protect the average worker...outside the previously state run sectors unions hardly exist, after all. The unions exist to look after themselves and any attack on their position is met with crippling strikes.....the dockers want to be included in the 'exceptions' to the raising of the retirement age, so they strike, bringing France's maritime commerce to a halt.
Dialogue?
Forget it.....just bully.
It happens in other spheres too.
I blog frequently about the scandal of the septic tank inspections...the hidden quotas, the inequality of treatment...(here)..... where the response of the water boards to the legitimate complaints of those concerned is to put up two fingers...or rather, this being France, just one finger... and threaten to send in the bailiffs.
Bullying.
A crooked politician wants to underpin the garden wall of his town house.
Does he pay for this himself?
No.
He causes damage to the wall on his side and calls on the neighbour on the other side to assume both the fault and the cost.
The neighbour is undergoing treatment for cancer.
The politician harasses him and his wife, night and day, with threatening telephone calls.
Bullied, they give in.
You do not, in your right mind, speak truth to power in France.
Didier has a phrase which sums it all up...
'Nous sommes pour rien...'
We count for nothing.
He knows.
An electricity line ran across the field behind his house to service an outlying house in the hamlet.
Then EDF decided that they wanted to re route the line via the roads for ease of access and proposed to run it round past Didier's house and garden. This would involve felling his plum trees, which were on the boundary.
The plum trees which supplied the raw materials for his eau de vie.
The owners of the house on the corner of the road, next door to Didier, protested.
If EDF put up new poles, they would block the drain that ran round their house and their walls would become damp.
The EDF subcontractors agreed to put the line underground to meet their objections...after all, the long term aim was to put all lines underground.
Didier asked them if they could not just extend the underground line past his property, another fifty metres...if the lines had to go underground anyway at some point.
No.
Why not?
Because they weren't obliged to do so. And who was he anyhow?
Trivial?
Not to Didier.
And the whole thing was an eyesore in a pretty hamlet.
Conformity is dinned into the French from their schooldays....individuality is not appreciated.
Not only is there only one answer...there is only one question, and woe betide you if you run over the lines of the box provided for ticking.
I don't and didn't have children going through the system but I noted with French friends' grandchildren that it suited the plodders and tended to bore the pants off the imaginative.
No wonder it produces a culture of box ticking and inflexibility.
So, kept in their place and that place well defined, is it any wonder that the French need an outlet for their frustrations?
A friend told me that in Iran the only place people feel that they control any part of their lives is when they are at the wheel...and that the driving is wild!
Well, let's look at French driving habits.
Tailgating....infuriated hooting when the lights change and the first car hasn't gone off at Mach 1...overtaking on the inside lane...overtaking on the brow of a hill...and revving their engines at full blast to do so....the coup de poisson....speeding......and as for filtering one and one at a lane closure...doesn't sound unlike the friend's description of Iranian drivers.
The behaviour I came across most often took place on a hump backed medieval bridge on the back road to town.
There was a right of way system, but just how many times, coming from the disfavoured end with nothing on the bridge, my little A3 would get half way only to find a white van, which had been invisible when I started to cross, just advancing and blocking the way.
Common sense would tell you that if you arrived at the favoured end when something was already on the bridge you would wait for it to clear, but common sense had nothing to do with it.
The white van was bigger and demanded right of way.
I have had threats of violence from the drivers of the white vans when I did not immediately reverse and this is nothing to do with discrimination...the car had local plates so until I replied they had no way of knowing that I was foreign.
It was the wish to dominate.
The wish to bully.
In relation to the threats of violence I cannot say that my replies, when being told to get off the bridge, were such as to turn away anger....more like grievous words to stir it up....but I don't like being bullied and I won't stand for it.
It strikes me that if, in France, you are not born into a family who can make your way for you in society, you are frustrated at every turn...and, if you are not of a naturally peaceful temperament, you take it out on those further down the pecking order.
Thus a frail elderly man, like my husband, was natural prey (here) for a bunch of louts encountered at a vide grenier.
If you have any sort of power, you use it, you demonstrate it, in order to maintain your status.
Now, turning to the sense of discrimination felt by immigrants, add to the mixture of ticked boxes and the pecking order the intense chauvinism of France..the land where the French believe that the best of everything is to be found...and you find a very volatile situation.
The foreigner, just by not being French, is inferior, as is his or her culture.
His or her knowledge and experience counts for nothing as not being French.
Thus, in whatever situation, the French view should prevail.
Even if the French view as presented is totally illegal in the French system and would be laughed to scorn by any other French person...particularly a Parisian. (here)
There is an underlying feeling that a person who does not speak the same language is stupid...and is thus a mark, to be taken advantage of.....and how annoyed are the partisans of this view when the 'mark' refuses to have advantage taken.
How, I might wonder in passing, is one to speak the same language when it is a patois unintelligible to people living only a hundred kilometres away, but this is a problem which does not trouble for one moment the speaker of patois concerned.
I had a problem of this sort years ago with the contractor who was installing a septic tank at a house I was renovating. He was weeks behind schedule and the only way to get him on the job was to track him down every week and nag him.
He didn't like it and neither did I.
Just before Christmas, job still not finished, he turned up at my house demanding payment.
I told him he would be paid when he finished the job.
He looked round at my house and its setting and said
'I see where your money goes, keeping up this place...no wonder you can't pay poor men's bills...'
It was like having a conversation on railway tracks diverging at the points.
He genuinely thought that he could shame me into paying him for something he had not done.
I had money, he wanted it...despite not having finished the job.
It was like dealing with a very primitive organism.
But at least the hostilities remained at the verbal level; he did not try violence, which is what happened to a friend (here) in similar circumstances.
The other side of this coin is the refusal to understand anything you, the immigrant, might say.
One part of this is that common phenomenon....
'This is a foreigner, he or she doesn't speak French - even when you are addressing them in that language - so I can't understand.'
A sort of panic.
The other part is a refusal to believe that anything the immigrant might say could have any value.
I had asked for a speed limit sign on the stretch of road by my house, where the local hillbillies used to come screaming off a bend into a short straight just before running into the ditch on the next bend at the limit of my property.
Formalities and begging letter to the President of the Conseil General completed, a road engineer turned up and so, by sheer coincidence, did the Maire.
Me to road engineer
'You can see the problem...they pick up speed coming out of that bend and lose control on the next one.
Maire to road engineer
'There's no need for this at all, the road is perfectly straight between here and St. Ragondin.'
Me to Maire, pointing with both arms to the bends at either end of the straight
'What are those then? Scotch mist?'
Maire to road engineer
'The road is perfectly straight.'
The matter was resolved by producing the letter from the President of the Conseil General authorising the work..a copy of which had been sent to the Maire in any case, but it was an interesting experience.
There is also the commonly held view that economic life is a pie diagram...and the more fingers in the pie (immigrants) the less plums there are for the French.
Following on from the chauvinism, where everything French is best, it is clear that immigrants only come to France to take advantage of what it provides, thus taking what rightfully should be available only to the French themselves.
Chance would be a fine thing!
The hoops you have to jump through to get anywhere with what is laughingly called a system in France would baffle all but the most hardened benefit cheat....there are times when it baffles even the French!
Like a lot of things, you have to be able to understand French and how France works - not in order to avoid discrimination, but to understand how and why it operates.
It is not universal, luckily, but it does exist and it seems to me that some of the people who claim never to have been discriminated against are those who could be said to have integrated well......
In that they are as supine and unquestioning as the majority of those of their host nation.
Like a lot of things, you have to be able to understand French and how France works - not in order to avoid discrimination, but to understand how and why it operates.
It is not universal, luckily, but it does exist and it seems to me that some of the people who claim never to have been discriminated against are those who could be said to have integrated well......
In that they are as supine and unquestioning as the majority of those of their host nation.
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