Abstract
In early 2000, the hardening of immigration laws in France threatened many undocumented foreigners with deportation. Among these foreigners, many had children educated in French schools. Facing this situation, parents of pupils set up a network in 2004 (“Réseau Education Sans Frontières” [RESF], still active today), to denounce the deportation of young children, prevent these evictions and regularise the status of the endangered families.
This chapter aims to analyse the original critical register developed by these militants. Reluctant to use overly general political categories to defend the undocumented immigrants, they want to first show that they are an integral part of local communities. Support committees are anchored in a local environment and the network gives national visibility to the issue of “undocumented families”. Thus the RESF activists are not building a cause in the usual way, by detaching individual cases from local and contingent situations but, conversely, by relying on their singularity and irreducibility. The political fight consists here in showing that legal and administrative criteria are not enough to define membership and integration: the inclusion in the life of the neighbourhood or school offers an alternative definition of political community.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the last big hunger strikes of the sans-papiers took place in Paris during spring and summer 1996. Several hundred African sans-papiers occupied the church of Saint Ambroise during March 1996; following their evacuation and their withdrawal to different locations, some of them then occupied the church of Saint-Bernard in June 1996 and went on hunger strike before being driven out in August the same year. This mobilisation was the high point of a form of engagement identified by Johanna Siméant (1998), whereby the sans-papiers, who are often alone and acting for themselves, occupy places of worship, begin hunger strikes and are supported by numerous others: Left-wing political parties, unions, clerics, intellectuals and artists. The mobilisations continued for the next two years: first, at the start of 1997, in opposition to the proposed Debré law, which sought to establish close control of foreigners as well as those likely to give them shelter, then again in 1998, thanks to the rejection of the regularisation bill of June 24, 1997 and the Left’s return to government.
- 2.
Three such laws and an ordinance entered into force in France between 2003 and 2007, and no fewer than 29 decrees of application between 2006 and 2008 (GISTI 2008). A fourth law was adopted by Parliament on May 11, 2001.
- 3.
As the daily updates of its website attest: http://www.educationsansfrontieres.org/ (page consulted on March 15, 2017).
- 4.
It is important from the outset to clarify that this is not universally the case and that some local RESF committees, in the Parisian suburbs as well as in the provinces, depended on the support of experienced activists (Dupont 2009; Mathieu 2010); this is confirmed by what we saw among members of local committees in the Parisian suburbs.
- 5.
Daniel Mouchard (2002, 2009) relates how the movements of the “excluded” in the 1990s (the sans-papiers, but also the unemployed and precariously housed) raised their concerns to the level of generality through a critique of the state and by demanding rights; he also underlines the difficulties these movements encountered.
- 6.
- 7.
Thanks to the participants in this course and, in particular, to Alexandre Egbako, Caroline Ahti, Pierre Bertho, Sarah Cousin, Pauline Fourcade, Charlène Guérin, Sabrina Merabet and Samina Zouag.
- 8.
Sangatte is the name of a seaside town close to Calais. Between 1999 and 2002, it was the site of a camp for migrants and refugees trying to reach England. Its administrative closure resulted, in the years that followed, in the reconstruction of informal camps close to the port of Calais, which became known among migrants as the “Jungle”.
- 9.
In France, the prefect is the state’s representative in each region and département. From the prefecture, (s)he coordinates all the administrative services of the state at the local level. The city of Paris, which is both a commune and a département, is unique in having both a departmental prefect and a separate prefect of police.
- 10.
The Pasqua law of September 9, 1986 restarted the deportations abolished by the government of the Left in 1981 and restricted foreigners’ access to residency cards. The Pasqua law of August 24–29, 1993 limited both access to French nationality and the principle of jus soli.
- 11.
In this sense, the emotional shock felt on discovering an undocumented person in one’s immediate environment already warrants engagement. For Patricia Paperman (1997), if emotion warrants public engagement, this is because it is underpinned by a shareable judgement about what is acceptable or unacceptable. Her cognitive conception of emotions is distinct from that of James Jasper (1997), who with the notion of “moral shock” seeks to account for a social experience prior to engagement.
- 12.
This situation is dramatised by the symbol of the “empty chair”, which was employed by an RESF awareness-raising campaign run during Autumn 2006 as students returned to school.
- 13.
“The Marseille prefecture and human rights”, Milleboards.org, June 26, 2009. See the testimony of an RESF activist: Roselyn Rollier, “Chronicle of an ordinary day at the police headquarters”, Rue89.com, July 9, 2009.
- 14.
Daniel Mouchard (2002), who is interested in the sans-papiers movements of the 1990s, also shows that critique focuses on the most everyday aspects of familiar institutions: those seeking jobs, housing or asylum coming up against the complexity of the regulations or the behaviour of officials. At that time, the narratives of lived experiences were already being diffused via pamphlets and websites. “This critique of the proximate”, he writes, “appears as an essential premise for the construction of a more general discourse denouncing the state” (p. 429). Mouchard also sets about showing the continuum that extends from the narratives of mistreatment experienced by plaintiffs to a demand in terms of rights, passing via a critique of the state. But the RESF exhibits nothing of this kind: there is neither a critique of the state nor any elaboration of a position on rights such as that developed by the movement of sans-papiers in 1995 and 1998, notably through the notion of the “right to free movement of people”. The reference to rights—right to family life, right to education—is not entirely absent but is instead mobilised instrumentally, for example, in the judicial arena.
- 15.
Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (Communist Revolutionary League). A Trotskyist political party founded in 1974 which dissolved itself into the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA, New Anticapitalist Party) in 2009.
- 16.
The presentation of Bernard Gaudillière, assistant to the mayor of Paris, given in April–May 2009 in Lyon, begins as follows: “At the end of 2008, the French government boasted of having progressed to 29,796 deportations of sans-papiers during the course of the previous year. The ministry of immigration and national identity certainly proved their application! Behind these cold and anonymous figures we would do well to remember that there are people. We talk about dossiers, about administrative situations, about procedures, about texts and laws … never about people, about journeys, about families or lives”.
- 17.
Anyone who receives a decision from a French administrative authority that they disagree with is able, before going down the legal route, to ask the administration to review its decision either by appealing to whoever took the decision—through a recours gracieux—or by appealing to their superior—through a recours hiérarchique.
- 18.
These expressions echo, almost word for word, the demand for belonging of the “Sans-papiers manifesto”, published in the newspaper Libération in February 1997 and read by Madjiguène Cissé in the film We, the sans-papiers of France. The text says: “We live among you, and most of us have done for years. […] We pay our taxes, our rents, our charges… and our social security contributions. […] We enrich France with our diversity. […] We also often live with our partners and our children who were either born in France or who came here when they were very young. […] We gave a number of these children French names; we send them to the schools of the Republic. We have opened the path that should lead them to acquire French nationality. […] We have our families in France, but also our friends”. The words of the RESF activists thus present themselves as affirmation that they recognise this belonging.
- 19.
A more psychological version of this idea is developed by Miguel Benasayag and Angélique Del Rey (2008) through the notion of a “mirror effect”. They argue that the policy that led to the migrants finding themselves in an irregular situation produced trauma and psychological shock, both for the sans-papiers and their children, as well as for their children’s classmates.
- 20.
The idea of the school community is an old one, even if the term only began to be used around the events of 1968 to denote a shift in focus from class to institution (Derouet 1992). The law of July 1975 specified that the school community included the staff, the parents and the students, recognising parents’ right to be informed and to sit on school councils. From 1989, the guideline law on education favoured the term educational community to denote the community made up of students and all those who, within the school or related to it, participate in their education: parents, teachers, non-teaching staff and anyone else involved. Despite frequent use in pedagogical documents and the discourse of parent associations, the idea of the school community struggles to make itself flesh, except during school fairs, which give it a body for the length of a morning.
- 21.
A school group brings together several nursery and primary schools that are geographically proximate. Generally speaking, its constituent schools educate children from the same neighbourhood. In this case, the school group brought together four schools located on the same road.
- 22.
The Federation of Councils of Parents of Students (FCPE) was the first French parents’ federation. Close to the political parties of the Left, it defends the values of a secular, free and solidary education. Its presence in the school group we observed is representative of its presence in other schools. Like the national federation, the Parisian federation explicitly supports the RESF.
- 23.
Although it recruits parents with less marked political convictions than the FCPE, the local association in question defends similar values. During the years before our observation, it gained a majority within the school group at the elections of parent representatives.
- 24.
This was true, for example, of the farandole protests that took place in Paris between 2006 and 2007. These began from multiple rallying points at schools in various Parisian neighbourhoods, before converging in a march towards the centre (Canal Saint-Martin, Canal de l’Ourcq).
- 25.
Widely known to date back to the French Revolution, though nonetheless clearly established and constructed on the model of Christian baptism, the parrainage républicain does not produce a change in civil status as does, for example, registering a marriage or birth. It is rather a secular symbolic display whose purpose is to admit the parrainé into the republican community through the commitment of their parrains (secular “godfathers”, or male sponsors) or marraines (secular “godmothers”, or female sponsors). In the case of the parrainages of undocumented people, the ceremony symbolically signifies both their being welcomed into the republican community and the commitment of the parrains and marraines.
- 26.
In this sense, the ceremonies completed at the instigation of RESF fully recognise the personalisation of relations with the sans-papiers, contrary to those at the end of the 1990s which were only able to take place following a series of rulings that held personalisation and the affective—both considered non-political—at a distance.
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de Blic, D., Lafaye, C. (2020). Undocumented Families and Political Communities: Parents Fighting Deportations. In: Frère, B., Jacquemain, M. (eds) Everyday Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18987-7_2
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