Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979 - Hardcover

Shepard, Todd

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022649327X ISBN 13: 9780226493275

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2018

Synopsis

The aftermath of Algeria’s revolutionary war for independence coincided with the sexual revolution in France, and in this book Todd Shepard argues that these two movements are inextricably linked.​

Sex, France, and Arab Men is a history of how and why—from the upheavals of French Algeria in 1962 through the 1970s—highly sexualized claims about Arabs were omnipresent in important public French discussions, both those that dealt with sex and those that spoke of Arabs. Shepard explores how the so-called sexual revolution took shape in a France profoundly influenced by the ongoing effects of the Algerian revolution. Shepard’s analysis of both events alongside one another provides a frame that renders visible the ways that the fight for sexual liberation, usually explained as an American and European invention, developed out of the worldwide anticolonial movement of the mid-twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Todd Shepard is the Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents and The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979

By Todd Shepard

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-49327-5

Contents

INTRODUCTION / Sex Talk and the Post-Algerian History of France, 
ONE / The Far Right and the Reinvigoration of Sexual Orientalism in Post-Decolonization France, 
TWO / May '68, "Arab Perversion," and Anti-Arab Racism, 
THREE / The Algerian Revolution and Arab Men in the Fight for Sexual Revolution, 
FOUR / Homosociality, "Human Contact," and the Specter of the Arab Man in the Post-'68 French Gay World, 
FIVE / Prostitution and the Arab Man, 1945-1975: Algerian Pimps and the "Takeover" of the "Whores of France", 
SIX / Prostitution and the Arab Man, 1962-1979: Prostitutes, Arab Clients, and "the Traffic in White Women", 
SEVEN / Power, Resistance, and Sodomy in Post-Algerian France, 
EIGHT / Rape as Metaphor in the 1970s, 
NINE / Rape as Act in the 1970s, 
CONCLUSION / The Erotics of Algerian Difference, 1979/2016, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
Footnotes, 

CHAPTER 1

The Far Right and the Reinvigoration of Sexual Orientalism in Post-Decolonization France

Vice undoubtedly played a larger role than even oil in what concluded with the capitulation of Evian.

— André Figueras (1962)

Between 1962 and 1968, it can seem, the longstanding erotic fascination of the French for Algerians had faded. But this seems true if one attends only to evidence from the vast majority in France who met Algeria's independence — after thirteen decades of French occupation — with acceptance, relief, joy, or indifference. On the far right, things looked different, as writers, theorists, and activists fixed on the upheaval around sex the conflict had catalyzed, and sought to make sense of it. In their read, it was sexual trouble that explained what they saw as political problems; sexual abnormality set the stage for the collapse of France's "natural" domination of Algeria. As the end of French Algeria approached, most intensively at the moment of Algerian independence and then over the course of the 1960s, people in the "national/nationalist camp" rehearsed claims about sexual acts, sexualized humiliation, and lust to explain how France had lost Algeria and what lessons must be learned. They homed in on "deviant" masculinity, with assertions about the aberrant hypermasculinity of "Arabs" and the decadent effeminacy that had made the French unable to defeat them. They also sought to use such references to advance their ultranationalist political agenda. This meant rewriting the history of French Algeria, French imperialism, and the Algerian war in order to make the healthy virile leadership they claimed to incarnate seem urgently necessary for France in the aftermath of Algerian independence.

In the last years of the Algerian war, when the long-standing (if retrospectively odd) French consensus that "Algeria is France" had finally shattered, the far right joined with others to defend the claim. Ultranationalists, en masse, enthusiastically embraced the argument that all people born in Algeria were fully French. This meant that not just the "European" and Jewish minorities but the large "Muslim" (Berber and Arab) majority, too, were français à part entière [completely French]. Far right voices adopted whole cloth antiracist arguments central to French republicanism — and historically anathema to their political family — in order to keep Algeria within the French Republic. On the one hand, such affirmations sought to give depth to the fact that, legally, both Algeria's territory and its people were French. On the other, they aimed to deny that Algeria was a colony or that racist colonialism had rendered French promises about the inclusion of Arabs and Berbers in the French nation unbelievable to most. The failure of such arguments to prevent independence helps to explain the intensity and contours of the racism that followed. Too many subsequent commentators blame repatriates — the pieds noirs, people of "European" or Jewish backgrounds who left their native Algeria after independence and resettled in metropolitan France — for spreading the virus of racism in post-decolonization France. The Algerian framing of post-decolonization French racism and far-right ideology, however, is far more complex. It was not "transferred" onto French soil around 1962, pace Benjamin Stora. It developed there, stoked by unresolved paradoxes linked to the failed republican project of French Algeria and its disappearance. Claims about gender and sex, and especially about manliness and virility, anchored and shaped novel formulations of longstanding fears.

After 1962, new racist arguments seemed necessary to explain the defeat of the French Algeria cause and to move beyond it. These arguments can appear to be a simple recalibration of old xenophobic reflexes, which at various points since the mid-nineteenth century had targeted "alien" groups — most obsessively, Jews — as enemies of France. The primary target, now, was the Arab, the Algerian, and the Muslim — although the latter category would prove less central until after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Proponents of the new anti-Arab racism presumed that the Algerian revolutionaries' victory over France, ongoing tensions between the two countries, and the growing number of Algerians living in metropolitan France were factors that made this enemy different, more threatening. Two themes were crucial and linked: "invasion" and sexual crimes. Both emphasized the ongoing intimacy of French-Algerian connections as sources of danger. These propelled far-right militant warnings that the Arab threat was an existential danger to their nation.

After the Algerian war, the French ultra-right fringe reached its lowest point of influence ever. It ebbed even more than it had after 1945, when links to the Nazi occupiers, the Vichy state, and collaboration had led to prison terms for many activists and discredited the movement in the eyes of most French people. Ideologically, those who remained on the far right — and, most important, those who had recently joined their ranks, almost all drawn by their commitment to "French Algeria" — accentuated this movement's long-standing anti-Marxism and its post-1940 anti-Gaullism. What was new was an intense focus on what they identified, in the words of historian René Chiroux, as "the threat posed by ... the rise of peoples of color," whom previously they had merely despised or denigrated. This included a disdainful fixation on the leaders of newly independent states ("N — — r Kings," in their jargon) and an emotional investment in the struggles of white supremacist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia and in the defense of Portuguese colonialism and US segregationism. Such language summoned what can be thought of as a "white international" to stymie the course of world events. The January 1965 cover of Europe-action, a monthly journal published from 1963 to 1966 that had great influence in the far-right milieu, warned that "In Africa, It's OPEN SEASON on Whites," with a photo of a miserable-looking, disheveled, and barefooted blond girl as illustration (figure 4). One aspect of the fight most engaged them, however: to stop Algerian immigration. (Indeed, the same 1965 cover also announced a story that supposedly revealed the power of "The FLN in the South of France.")

The ultranationalist right quickly qualified their fight as resistance to "the Algerian invasion of France." This became the most important struggle in what they saw as a larger war to defend French identity, a campaign that had to be pursued not only in print but on the ground. Until the events of May 1968, the far left and, more broadly, the French media and mainstream politicians paid little attention to the country's large numbers of non-European immigrants. Yet right-wing extremists had paid much attention. The periodical Europe-action, along with a small but energetic activist group with the same name, played central roles. In the midst of the 1965 presidential campaign, activists from Europe-action organized multiple and sometimes violent public demonstrations around the motto "Algerian immigration: stop" (figure 5). The theme of "the Algerian invasion of France" was first turned into a rallying cry in the pages Europe-action. The revue was home to a cadre of ideologues (Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Jean Mabire), whose incendiary ideas served both to renew far-right doctrine and, later, to produce what became the "Nouvelle Droite." It was a fundamental shift in emphasis, notably in how it presented Arabs as more worrisome than Jews. In 1967, the former editor of La libre parole (the antisemitic newspaper founded in the late nineteenth century by Edouard Drumont), Henry Coston approvingly noted that Europe-action "has vigorously denounced the invasion by foreign elements that it judges dangerous for public peace and health," even as he regretted that "they have broken with those 'obsessed by the Judeo-Tibetan Hydra.'" While many on the far right and elsewhere in France continued to fixate on a supposed Jewish menace to French society, other elements were now absorbed in racialized fears about Algerian immigrants. (Many fully embraced both forms of xenophobia; François Brigneau of Minute, for example, had joined the collaborationist Milice in 1944 and continued to vilify Jews even as he campaigned against Arabs.)

It was the post-1962 reduction of "Arab" masculinity to "hypervirility" that grounded far-right efforts to prove that this group was more threatening than other supposed menaces, past or present. "Invasion" emphasized "mass" action, which took up far-right arguments against refugees in the 1930s, but was different from the dense register of antisemitic claims, which obsessed over the dangers posed by Jewish individuals and the transnational networks they supposedly maintained. Specifically, the "Arab invasion" topos, with its emphasis on brutish male lust, marginalized fantasies of seduction, which anti-Semitic certainties that "the Jew" was both effeminate cosmopolitan and rapacious beast foregrounded. (It differed in similar ways from the other most important French trope of aberrant masculinity, which presented religious Catholics, too, as effeminate, rapacious, and in fealty to foreigners.) This new bête noire, usually depicted as male and lust-driven — and in ways that obfuscated the politics of French-Algerian histories even as they drew on anger and resentment about French "humiliation" — proved remarkably compelling to ever-growing numbers of French people.

From "Masculine Humanism" to the the Crisis of Masculinity

The far right's own fixation on manly strength and virility helps explain their post-Algerian obsession with the masculinity of both "Arabs" and "the French." To explain the defeat in Algeria, they presented the former as deviant and dangerous and the latter as emasculated. The first target of these extremists was other ("white"/"European") French men. This was particularly visible among self-defined "national/nationalist" youth groups, who insistently mocked the "dubious" masculinity of other youth movements. A 1966 photo montage published in Cahiers universitaires, a journal edited by men who would become key figures in the Nouvelle Droite, celebrated "Parisian students tired of seeing the Latin Quarter invaded by a horde of hairy and repugnant 'beatniks.'" They "made the decision to establish ... a select committee for immediate haircuts. ... Vigorous hands thus took up scissors and considerably refreshed the scuzzy mops of several beatniks who appeared to be of the male sex." While in 1944 it was women accused of "horizontal collaboration" with male enemies whose heads had been shaved ("les tondues") by anti-Nazi and anticolloborationist mobs, here a neofascist organization targeted the hair of French men who had failed to embody the rightist radicals' vision of manliness. An August 1969 report from the Prefecture de police described how "physical force ... is a priority for militants" of the new and youthful far-right group Occident. Its members "need to inspire fear" while their embrace of "violent fisticuffs aim to prove that the movement physically matters." The choice of words — "vigorous hands," "violent fisticuffs"–emphasizes building solidarity through a hyperphysicality that can be deployed towards violent ends. Occident would come to be known as a group that fetishized "manly," militant behavior, seeing it as preferable to an indulgence in the feckless pursuit of theoretical concerns. Yet, as several scholars have convincingly demonstrated in discussions of interwar fascist movements across Europe, including Nazism, to take such self-presentation at face value misses the mark. Far-right agitation was girded by theory, and the quest for manliness seemed to offer one way into larger discussions. Affirmations of biological "truths" about masculinity seemed well-suited to legitimate other ideological claims.

Dominique Venner was a long-time far-right militant who had fought with the paratroopers in Algeria (1954–1956), had been imprisoned for his ties to the OAS (1961–1962), and had then launched Europe-action. He proposed an ideology that he named "masculine humanism" in Pour une critique positive (written and circulated in 1962, first published in 1964). The text aimed to do for the post-Algerian far right — the "nationalist revolution," as the author and others characterized their struggle — what Lenin's "What is to be Done?" (1902) had offered to Russian Marxists. In Venner's vision, true manliness was the only embodiment of the truly human. It thus could anchor an authoritarian and racist program to "save" France and Europe.

For this far right, sexual liberation was the newest danger that threatened the "white race." A 1965 cover story in the extremist Révolution européenne hints at how worried many in the milieu were: "Homosexuality, eroticism: What they are is weapons against white peoples." Thus, to respond to this particular alloy of enemies, it was necessary to rejuvenate certain superior men so they could defend the "race." "Masculinism," argued Venner, needed to be the foundation of ideological renewal because, in his tendentious reading of the scholarship, "five percent of individuals, sociologists admit, are deeply perverted, insane, vice-ridden." Like moralizing sexologists since the late nineteenth century, certain eugenicists, and fascist and Nazi theorists, he identified such people as meriting punishment, perhaps elimination. "At the far other end, one can observe a similar proportion of men who, naturally and in a developed way, possess particular qualities of energy and self-sacrifice that predispose them to serve the community, which is to say to lead it." A new far right, Venner proposed, needed to focus on exposing how "democracies, which have installed the reign of scheming and of money, are largely under the control of" the perverted. In turn, "the Nationalist Revolution will need to get rid of the first and bring the second to power." Venner and many of his ideological brothers embraced paganism. Yet their concerns resonated with key Catholic far-right thinkers, such as the Belgian moral philosopher Marcel de Corte, a Maurrassian and counterrevolutionary. Their dedication to enforcing clear distinctions between people focused most on divisions between men and women. Their writings, however, spent much space bemoaning indifferentation — the modern insistence that, socially, all people are fundamentally the same, rather than divided into distinct groups that must be hierarchically ordered — and this connected them tightly to more explicitly racist theorists. De Corte's contribution to one of many early 1960s efforts to renovate far-right thinking, this one in Ecrits de Paris, began with the affirmation: "— Our century quite clearly is not that of definition. It wallows in the vague, the unclear." He claimed that "the art of definition, which is essentially objective, has been lost." Instead, "everywhere it has been replaced by what I crudely and directly call 'logical masturbation.'" The overarching metaphor he chose emphasized the causal role so many on the far right assigned to sexual perversion and gender deviance. "Contemporary philosophy is homosexual from the bottom to the top: the other qua other is banished and only the other as me is recognized. ..." Such affirmations would later develop into key anchors for the arguments of French scholars who vilified late-1990s government proposals to legalize domestic partnership (the PACS) as a way to offer state recognition of same-sex couples. In 2012 and 2013, leaders of the mass movement to stop the extension of civil marriage to same-sex couples popularized such claims that legal reform threatened to destroy the very foundations of human civilization, and were helped by journalists and public intellectuals who uncritically echoed them. In the 1960s, however, they were part of a vigorous post-decolonization discussion on the far right about how to save "European peoples" from imagined enemies.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022649327X
• ISBN 13: 9780226493275
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336