Educated Out of the Margins: Two Memoirs Challenge France’s Immigrant Success Myth
David Tresilian reviews two new French memoirs, by economist El Mouhoub Mouhoud and sociologist Marwan Mohammed, that trace journeys from Kabylie and the Paris banlieues into the country’s academic elite. Both reject the myth of solitary self-making, crediting family, mentors, and France’s tuition-free universities, and ask whether that same path still stands open to the generation coming up behind them.
Like buses in London, which often arrive in pairs after a long wait, recent months have seen the publication of two memoirs by two senior French academics of North African descent, both exploring the relationship between their professional success and their social upbringing and background. Neither author feels that success was fated to come their way, given what they see as an accumulation of early disadvantages that included social class and ethnic origins. However, neither has set out to write a rags-to-riches story on the Anglo-Saxon model either, the kind of thing that identifies hard work as the most important factor in explaining the ascent from hard-scrabble origins to a more comfortable social position.
What makes these books stand out, perhaps particularly for the foreign reader, is that neither El Mouhoub Mouhoud, author of the Le Prénom, esquisse pour une auto-histoire de l'immigration algérienne,[1] nor Marwan Mohammed, author of C'était pas gagné! De l'échec scolaire au CNRS,[2] sees their success as being due only to individual talent. Both attribute their success to the strength of their families and the support networks surrounding them and to the mentors they met along the way in the French education system.
Despite some nibbling around the edges in recent years, French university education is effectively free and available to all without regard for economic background. These two memoirs are accounts of social mobility through the French system of education, and both men see it not only as having rescued them as individuals from what could have been unfulfilling jobs but also as having held out a promise of advancement for the generations from which they come. An underlying theme is that the French education system can be particularly valuable to young people of North African and Arab background eager to find their way in France whether as first- or second-generation immigrants.
El Mouhoub Mouhoud, an economist and now president of l’Université Paris-Sciences et Lettres having previously held the same post at l’Université Paris Dauphine, arrived in France at the age of ten from his native Algeria, where his family, Kabyles from Grande Kabylie, had had few opportunities outside their native village. Marwan Mohammed, now a sociologist with the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique – France’s major academic research organization) in Paris, was born in France of Moroccan parents. After what he calls an échec scolaire – dropping out of school – he made his way to somewhere near the top of the French academic hierarchy as a full-time researcher.
Both men have written memoirs at least in part to correct what they see as false impressions of North African career progression in France. El Mouhoub Mouhoud says that he has written a ‘personal social and political history of Algerian immigration’ showing that ‘individual social and academic success is the product of a particular cultural, familial, and social history.’ His memoir draws attention away from the stereotype of ‘two opposed types of immigration,’ he says, namely ‘delinquency and public housing projects on the one hand and football stars on the other,’ and towards ‘the vast majority of immigrant young men and women who integrate [into French society] through the schools of the Republic.’
What’s in a Name?
El Mouhoub Mouhoud calls his memoir Le Prénom, the first name, subtitling it an esquisse pour une auto-histoire de l'immigration algérienne, a sketch for an autobiography of Algerian immigration, or, put more bluntly, an autobiographical account of Algerian immigration. Perhaps there is a nod to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose well-known book Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique was built upon fieldwork completed in the Kabylie region of Algeria. There is also his later memoir, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, that may have inspired El Mouhoub Mouhoud’s title.
The book is relatively short at around 290 pages, and it takes the reader from the author’s native village of Tifrit Nath Oumalik some 50 km southeast of Tizi Ouzou in northeastern Algeria, where he was born in 1960, to his arrival in France in 1970 and through his subsequent university career. He quotes the French sociologist of Algerian descent Abdelmalek Sayad in the introduction, explaining that Sayad, recognized as an academic authority on North African immigration to France, held that this cannot be fully understood only by focusing on the experiences of immigrants in France, the pull factors in the jargon, whether the search for education, better-paying jobs, or better prospects for family and children. There are also the circumstances immigrants left behind in order to start new lives abroad.
Le Prénom starts with those, unraveling both the origins of the author’s name, a source of some later difficulties, as well as his first contacts with the world of education. El Mouhoub is the French transcription of mawhūb, ‘gifted’ or ‘bestowed,’ apparently pronounced in the author’s native Amazigh as L’Muhuv and when combined with his family name yielding El Mouhoub Mouhoud, a ‘funny sort of repetition that made my later life difficult.’
There are many pages in his book about life in Kabylie in the 1960s, in which he describes the ways families and communities were organized at the village level and how these were modified by the War of Independence, the development priorities of the post-colonial state, and the ever-present pull of internal or external migration. He quotes from some of the classic Kabylie writers of the mid twentieth century, among them Mouloud Mammeri and Mouloud Feraoun, along with French writers who also wrote on the region – Bourdieu and Albert Camus, of course, along with anthropologist Germaine Tillion.
He has some amusing memories of life in France for a boy of Algerian-Kabylie origin, especially one with an indigestible name and a working-class family background. Placed in a French primary school on his arrival in France, he found himself in the class of a French-Algerian pied noir teacher still apparently hurting from the Independence War and his own enforced emigration. Later, as a student studying economics at the Université de Paris 1 in the 1980s he mixes with members of the French bourgeoisie, and, upon an invitation to the home of one of his classmates, he finds himself sitting across the table from a retired French general who has definite views on France’s colonial wars.
‘Did you say Mouloud,’ the general asks.
‘No Mouhoub, it’s with an h and not Mouloud.’
‘It’s not very common as a name, and it can’t be easy to go around with a name like that.’
They move on to other matters. But the general returns to question his origins, ‘Did you say you were from Algeria?’ ‘Yes, monsieur, Algeria.’
‘But where in Algeria?’
‘From Kabylie, monsieur.’
‘I thought so – the Kabylies are not the same.’
‘Not the same as what, monsieur?’
‘Not the same as the Arabs – more intelligent, more civilized.’
Despite exchanges like these, El Mouhoub Mouhoud does not dwell on the instances of racism he may have encountered in France, preferring instead to make only mild criticisms of people’s tendency to guess what his views might be based on his ethnic and religious origins. He addresses what others might see as his position as a transfuge de classe – a ‘class defector’ – someone who has supposedly left their original group behind in order to rise in society – by arguing that the concept, closely related to that of ‘class traitor,’ is simplistic and incoherent.
From a Drop-out to CNRS
Marwan Mohammed’s journey from school drop-out to the CNRS was in some ways less straightforward, and this is reflected in his memoir, written both as a way of setting the record straight and with more polemical intentions behind it.
For whom does one write, he asks, quoting Jean-Paul Sartre and answering that people write for les miens – for those who are like themselves. While his own career has been anything but typical, captured in his book’s title, recounting it can be a way of saying that social outcomes are not decided in advance – c’était pas gagné – and that even a career that looks thoroughly exceptional can be understood sociologically – in other words dispassionately and without supposing any mysterious forces at work.
‘My personal history is a collective history,’ he writes. ‘It is a Yemeni, Moroccan, and French history [his family has Yemeni origins], an Arab and Amazigh history, a colonial and postcolonial history, an urban and popular history, and a history of universities and ideas.’ In telling it, he has been concerned to provide something to chew on for ‘young people … schoolchildren, students, colleagues, peers, fellow citizens, anyone who is looking for something or is questioning how things are.’ It is designed to ‘provoke discussion of the social and biographical background to the production of knowledge’ in France, with the author’s ‘experience as a racialized researcher and one of popular origin in the academic milieu’ contributing to ‘thinking about how this works and the relations of power within it.’
Some readers may finish El Mouhoub Mouhoud’s memoir feeling that it offers little guidance for later generations of Arab and North African immigrants to France. The country has changed profoundly since the 1970s, when Mouhoud began his journey. And by his own account, he did not experience the limited opportunities that many young people face today in the suburbs (banlieues) surrounding France’s major cities, areas that are often racially stigmatized. The same cannot be said about Marwan Mohammed’s memoir, since he embodies the story of someone who has successfully left the deprivation of the suburbs and has devoted himself professionally to understanding the society and people he left behind.
Born in 1975 in a grim suburb outside Paris, the kind of place that might seem to epitomize the country’s social problems, Marwan Mohammed explains that after a ‘catastrophic’ school career in which he managed to leave without a single qualification, he found a temporary job in a local youth center and registered to study for a youthwork certificate. ‘I told myself that I should at least have something to show my parents,’ he says, having been marked a failure by the education system. The decision led him to obtain a high-school equivalency diploma and, with this in hand, a place at university.
Reading Bourdieu’s 1993 book La Misère du monde, a collection of interviews dealing with unemployment, poverty, racism, school failure, housing insecurity, and other topics in contemporary France, he was inspired to turn his experience into the basis for sociological study. He can be harsh on some of those working to improve living conditions in deprived areas in France, whether through associations (charities) or state agencies, feeling uneasy about the workers’ social origins. They are an ‘ambiguous ally,’ even a ‘caricature of bourgeois leftism… and paternalism,’ and they can be infected with a kind of ‘neo-colonialism’ in their treatment of local populations. Nevertheless, it is such people, and the public agencies for which they work, to which he owes his success, he says.
The book contains much more about race and religion in contemporary France than can be easily summarized, as is to be expected from a writer who, in addition to describing his academic career and his remontada (comeback), gives details of some of the positions that have made him well known to a wider public. His academic work on gangs and youth violence has given him a position in the CNRS, but he is better known outside academia for his writing on Islamophobia in France, notably an introduction to the subject written with Abdellali Hajjat. He has some useful things to say about the attractions – and traps – of writing on subjects close to his own experience, his relationship to the media and academic institutions, and the connection between his academic work and his political positions.
Round upon round of budget cuts in France have damaged the efficiency and reputation of many public services, including education. Academic salaries are notoriously low, and jobs are hard to come by. Packed lecture halls, high drop-out rates, and poor career prospects are unfortunately all too familiar to many students. It is interesting to read two memoirs that so strikingly retain their faith in the education system despite its many shortcomings and notably for the role it can play in the lives of people of Arab and North African heritage.
