Nabila Ramdani: Echoes of Vichy
[Nabila Ramdani is a Paris-born journalist and commentator.]
It's the rentrée politique in Paris and Nicolas Sarkozy, son of a once-impoverished Hungarian immigrant, is glowing tycoon amber after spending the whole of August in Cap Nègre, at the vast home belonging to the family of his Italian-born wife, Carla Bruni. The president and first lady had an entire stretch of the security-scanned Riviera to themselves throughout their long holiday, providing evidence that not being wholly French need not be a barrier to living the leisured Gallic dream.
It was particularly disturbing, therefore, that Sarkozy should have aimed his sternest pre-vacation rant at those of us who share a similarly cosmopolitan background. In a speech in Grenoble, he suggested that all immigrants, as well as French citizens of "foreign descent", should have their nationality withdrawn if they are caught breaking the law. The trigger for the proposal was rioting in the city in mid-July, mainly by Muslim youths, who had taken to the streets after one was shot dead by the police following a failed robbery of a casino.
Ignoring the death in Grenoble and concentrating on the acts of car-torching that have blighted his entire presidency, Sarkozy said: "We are suffering the consequences of 50 years of insufficiently regulated immigration, which has led to a failure of integration."
He also failed to mention the shooting dead by gendarmes of a gypsy in July in Saint-Aignan, central France, after which a mob stormed the town's police station. Instead, he ordered the razing of dozens of Roma travellers' camps and pledged to deport thousands of them back to Bulgaria and Romania.
The former Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard has accused Sarkozy of mimicking the Nazi puppets of the wartime Vichy government. The collabos stripped "undesirables" of their nationality and later deported them to Nazi-occupied eastern Europe - albeit by train, rather than budget airline...
Read entire article at New Statesman (UK)
It's the rentrée politique in Paris and Nicolas Sarkozy, son of a once-impoverished Hungarian immigrant, is glowing tycoon amber after spending the whole of August in Cap Nègre, at the vast home belonging to the family of his Italian-born wife, Carla Bruni. The president and first lady had an entire stretch of the security-scanned Riviera to themselves throughout their long holiday, providing evidence that not being wholly French need not be a barrier to living the leisured Gallic dream.
It was particularly disturbing, therefore, that Sarkozy should have aimed his sternest pre-vacation rant at those of us who share a similarly cosmopolitan background. In a speech in Grenoble, he suggested that all immigrants, as well as French citizens of "foreign descent", should have their nationality withdrawn if they are caught breaking the law. The trigger for the proposal was rioting in the city in mid-July, mainly by Muslim youths, who had taken to the streets after one was shot dead by the police following a failed robbery of a casino.
Ignoring the death in Grenoble and concentrating on the acts of car-torching that have blighted his entire presidency, Sarkozy said: "We are suffering the consequences of 50 years of insufficiently regulated immigration, which has led to a failure of integration."
He also failed to mention the shooting dead by gendarmes of a gypsy in July in Saint-Aignan, central France, after which a mob stormed the town's police station. Instead, he ordered the razing of dozens of Roma travellers' camps and pledged to deport thousands of them back to Bulgaria and Romania.
The former Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard has accused Sarkozy of mimicking the Nazi puppets of the wartime Vichy government. The collabos stripped "undesirables" of their nationality and later deported them to Nazi-occupied eastern Europe - albeit by train, rather than budget airline...