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I know, propositional nation and all that, and in part you've inherited this from us and not England (Tocqueville talked about this). But it's also more true in France than it ever was in the United States.
We really really really don't give a shit about race compared to Americans. And we very much care about culture. The French have a reputation for being racists, but it's inaccurate, we're just extremely convinced of the primacy of our own culture, and the rest is accessory.
To give you an idea, even a whiff of something like your university race quotas would be a government shattering scandal over here. It's one of many cultural differences, much like we give zero shits about sexual impropriety whilst you regard it as a career ender.
Yeah I think we're in charge of deciding what we are and what our own criterions for group affiliation are, thank you very much. We've hated the Germans longer than your nation has even existed over this particular thing.
That much is evident.
But the objections even at the furthest right never are about the genetic makeup of these people, it's that they, sacrilegiously, do not regard themselves as French and do not behave like Frenchmen. It (almost) never has anything to do with their ancestry.
The thing is, if you believe that culture is downstream of citizens' personalities and proclivities (which I think it must be) and that those proclivities are at least somewhat genetic in origin, you run a real risk that a change in ethnicity will ultimately result in the death of the culture.
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If you find the time, would you care to talk a bit about the Dreyfus Affair? I'm quite curious about how it's interpreted in modern France.
Maybe I should. It's our ur-culture war after all, and there was a movie released recently about it that I thought was a fair treatment.
Please do! I only know about it on a surface level, from some Wikipedia reading and a bit of Zola. But it seems to strike directly at what you were saying, about only caring about culture. I'm not French, but to my surprise, my understanding of French ideals matches your description very closely. But I only have an outside view, and of course no society ever completely lives up to its ideals. And so I'm wondering what it looks like from the inside, today, and how it fits into the national myths of France. What lessons do French children learn from it? What do intelligent adults make of it?
My (American) historical education barely touched on it, and the more I learn about it, the more I think that omission may have been a huge mistake. Even on a purely practical level, it seems like Americans ought to learn about how other republics dealt with that sort of thing. Especially now that our own republic is starting to look unstable.
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