Why the French Don’t Recognize Minorities: Universalism, Minorities, and Race in France

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider why, over the past 150 years, France has proved singularly unreceptive to the concept of minorities, and to evaluate how this has impacted the development of the French nation. The French model of universalism is often invoked to account for the lack of recognition of ethnic and cultural minorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Basques, Bretons, Alsatians, and Catalans enjoyed rights as French citizens, but no particular rights because of their ethnicity and culture. There is more, however, to the absence of minority rights than an all encompassing universalistic ideology. The relationship between region and nation, center and periphery, played a central role in the establishment of state policy. The first part of the paper investigates the process by which the French Republic engaged diverse populations at the grassroots, and question whether the differences between France and other European nations are as significant as commonly argued.  
The second part of the paper will address whether there is a connection between the lack of recognition of ethnic minorities rooted in particular territories (e.g., the Bretons), and the equal lack of recognition of other “minorities” whose presence developed in the twentieth century.  These new populations, often of foreign or colonial heritage, were minorities in a rather different sense.  But is their exclusion and inclusion based on the same kinds of arguments?  I plan to investigate the tension between a Republic that seeks to include diverse groups on the basis of an egalitarian ideology but that commonly excludes the very populations it claims to embrace.  And, closer to the present, does the growing acceptance of the very term minorities in French (as in the expression minorités visibles) signal an important  historical shift in how state and society address the issue?