French people

French people can refer to:

• The legal residents and citizens of France, regardless of ancestry. For a legal discussion, see French nationality law.
• People whose ancestors lived in France or the area that later became France.

They are one of the Latin European peoples.

Legal residents and citizens

To be French, according to the first article of the Constitution, is to be a citizen of France, regardless of one's origin, race, or religion (sans distinction d'origine, de race ou de religion) According to its principles, France has devoted herself the destiny of a proposition nation, a generic territory where people are bounded only by the French language and the assumed willingness to live together, as defined by Ernest Renan's "plébiscite de tous les jours" ("daily referendum" about the willingness to live together). The debate concerning the integration of this view (an obvious point of friction is the status of minority languages) with the principles underlying the European Community remains open.

Persistent difficulties with French citizens with origins in Maghreb and West Africa are seen by some as signs of racism and discrimination, while others interpret it as the inevitable friction between sizable minorities and the majority culture. There is increasing dissatisfaction with, and within, growing ethno-cultural enclaves (communautarisme). The 2005 French riots that happened in difficult suburbs (les quartiers sensibles) were an example of such tensions that may be interpreted as ethnic conflict as appeared before in other countries like the USA and the UK.

A large number of foreigners have traditionally succeeded in living or have been permitted to do so in a country which prides itself on its openness, toleration and the quality of services available. However citizenship has been required in the last two centuries for many forms of employment, and a relatively high proportion of the population has been employed by the State. Application for French citizenship is often interpreted as a renouncement of previous state allegiance. The European treaties have formally permitted movement and European citizens enjoy formal rights to employment in the state sector (though not as trainees in reserved branches (e.g. as magistrates).

History

Most people who live in France are the descendants of Gallo-Romans, as well as Aquitanians (Basques), Iberians, Ligurians and Greeks in southern France, mixed with some Germanic peoples arriving at the end of the Roman Empire such as the Franks and the Burgundians, some Moors and Saracens, and some Vikings known as Normans who settled mostly in Normandy in the 9th century.

"France" etymologically derives from the word Francia, a territory where lived the Franks, a Germanic tribe that overran Roman Gaul at the end of the Roman Empire.

Some regions knew massive migrations of Celtic people for Brittany and Germanic people for Alsatia before the existence of the Frankish kingdoms, and the languages and culture of these groups keep perpetuating until this day in more modern forms.

Gaul

Gaul before complete Roman conquest circa 58 BC.
Gallia Narbonensis was influenced by Romans and Greeks.
Aquitania was inhabited or influenced by Basques.
Gallia Belgica was influenced by Germanic tribes.

In the pre-Roman era, all of Gaul (an area of Western Europe that encompassed all of what is known today as France, Belgium, part of Germany and Switzerland, and Northern Italy) was inhabited by a variety of peoples who were known collectively as the Gaulish tribes. Their ancestors were Celtic immigrants who came from Central Europe in the 7th century BC, and dominated native peoples (for the majority Ligures).

Gaul was conquered in 58-51 BC by the Roman legions under the command of General Julius Caesar (except the south-east which had already been conquered about one century earlier). The area then became part of the Roman Empire. Over the next five centuries the two cultures and peoples intermingled, creating a hybridized Gallo-Roman culture. The Gaulish language came to be supplanted by Vulgar Latin, which would later split into dialects that would develop into the French language. Today, the last redoubt of Celtic culture and language in France can be found in the northwestern region of Brittany, although this is not the result of a survival of Gaulish language but of a 5th century A.D. migration of Brythonic speaking Celts from Britain.

The Franks

With the decline of the Roman empire in Western Europe a third people entered the picture: the Franks, from which the word "French" derives. The Franks were a Germanic tribe who began filtering across the Rhine River from present-day Germany in the third century. By the early sixth century the Franks, led by the Merovingian king Clovis I and his sons, had consolidated their hold on much of modern-day France, the country to which they gave their name. The other major Germanic people to arrive in France (after the Franks and the Visigoths) were the Normans, Viking raiders from modern Denmark and Norway, who occupied the northern region known today as Normandy in the 9th century. The Vikings eventually intermarried with the local people, converting to Christianity in the process. It was the Normans who, two centuries later, would go on to conquer England. Eventually, though, the independent duchy of Normandy was incorporated back into the French kingdom in the Middle Ages. In the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in 1099, at most 120 000 Franks (predominantly French-speaking Western Christians) ruled over 350,000 Muslims, Jews, and native Eastern Christians.

15th to 18th century: the kingdom of France

In the roughly 900 years after the Norman invasions France had a fairly settled population. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, France experienced relatively low levels of emigration to the Americas, with the exception of the Huguenots. However, significant emigration of mainly Roman Catholic French populations led to the settlement of the provinces of Acadia, Canada and Louisiana, all (at the time) French possessions, as well as colonies in the West Indies, Mascarene islands and Africa.

On December 31, 1687 a community of French Huguenots settled in South Africa. Most of these originally settled in the Cape Colony, but have since been quickly absorbed into the Afrikaner population. After Champlain's founding of Quebec City in 1608, it became the capital of New France. Encouraging settlement was difficult, and while some immigration did occur, by 1763 New France only had a population of some 65,000. From 1713 to 1787, 30,000 colonists immigrated from France to the St. Domingue. In 1805, when the French were forced out of St. Domingue (Haiti) 35,000 French settlers were given lands in Cuba.

In the 1700s and early 1800s, a small migration of French emigrated by official invitation of the Habsburgs to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the nations of Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania. Some of them, coming from French-speaking communes in Lorraine and another wave are French Swiss Walsers from the Valais canton in Switzerland, they maintained for some generations the French language, and a specific ethnic identity, later labelled as Banat French, Français du Banat. By 1788 there were 8 villages populated by French colonists.

Creation of the French nation-state

The French nation-state appeared following the 1789 French Revolution and Napoleon's empire. It replaced the ancient kingdom of France, ruled by the divine right of kings.

Hobsbawm highlighted the role of conscription, invented by Napoleon, and of the 1880s public instruction laws, which allowed mixing of the various groups of France into a nationalist mold which created the French citizen and his consciousness of membership to a common nation, while the various regional languages of France were progressively eradicated.

The 1870 Franco-Prussian War, which led to the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, was instrumental in bolstering patriotic feelings; until World War I (1914-1918), French politicians never completely lost sight of the disputed Alsace-Lorraine region, which played a major role in the definition of the French nation, and therefore of the French people. During the Dreyfus Affair, anti-semitism became apparent. Charles Maurras, a royalist intellectual member of the far-right anti-parliamentarist Action Française party, invented the neologism of the anti-France, which was one of the first attempts at contesting the republican definition of the French people as composed of all French citizens regardless of their ethnic origins or religious beliefs. Charles Maurras' expression of the anti-France opposed the Catholic French people to four "confederate states" incarning the Other: Jews, freemasons, Protestants and, last but not least, the métèques ("metic").

Later immigration

Legally, the sovereign people of France are composed of all French citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion. Citizens of any ethnicity are included in that definition. Successive waves of immigrants during the 19th and 20th centuries were thus rapidly assimilated into French culture.

The INSEE does not collect data about language, religion, or ethnicity — on the principle of the secular and unitary nature of the French Republic.

Nevertheless, there are some sources dealing with just such distinctions:

• The CIA World Factbook defines the ethnic groups of France as being "Celtic and Latin with Teutonic, Slavic, North African, Sub-Saharan African, Indochinese, and Basque minorities. Overseas departments: black, white, mulatto, East Indian, Chinese, Amerindian". Its definition is reproduced on several Web sites collecting or reporting demographic data.

• The U.S. Department of State goes into further detail: "Since prehistoric times, France has been a crossroads of trade, travel, and invasion. Three basic European ethnic stocks — Celtic, Latin, and Teutonic (Frankish) — have blended over the centuries to make up its present population. . . . Traditionally, France has had a high level of immigration. . . . In 2004, there were over 6 million Muslims, largely of North African descent, living in France. France is home to both the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Europe."

• The Encyclopædia Britannica says that "the French . . . hardly constitute a unified ethnic group by any scientific gauge", and it mentions as part of the population of France, the Basques, the Celts (called Gauls by Romans) and the Germanic (Teutonic) peoples (including the Norsemen or Vikings). France also became "in the 19th and especially in the 20th century, the prime recipient of foreign immigration into Europe. . . ."

It is said by some that France adheres to the ideal of a single, homogeneous national culture, supported by the absence of hyphenated identities and by avoidance of the very term "ethnicity" in French discourse.

The discussion about social discrimination has become more important, in particular concerning the so-called "second-generation immigrants"; that is, French citizens born in France to immigrant parents.

France has undergone a high rate of immigration from Europe, Africa, and Asia throughout the 20th century. Michèle Tribalat, researcher at INED, found it difficult to estimate the number of French immigrants or those born to immigrants because of the absence of official statistics. Only three previous attempts had been made: in 1927, 1942, and 1986. According to the 2004 Tribalat study, among about 14 million people of foreign ascendancy (immigrants or people with at least one parent or grandparent who was an immigrant), 5.2 million were from Southern European ascendancy (Italy, Spain, Portugal), and 3 million from the Maghreb. Thus it was found that 23 percent of French citizens had at least one immigrant parent or grandparent. No recognized studies have been done covering the years since mass immigration started in the 20th century.

French people, and perhaps some tourists, waiting for a stoplight near the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris, November 2007. Photo by George Garrigues.

France's population dynamics began to change in the middle of the 19th century, as France joined the Industrial Revolution. The pace of industrial growth attracted millions of European immigrants over the next century, with especially large numbers arriving from Poland, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. In the period from 1915 to 1950, just as many immigrants came from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, Scandinavia and Yugoslavia. A small French descent group also subsequently arrived from Latin America (Argentina , Chile and Uruguay) in the 1970s. Small but significant numbers of Frenchmen in the North and Northeast regions have relatives in Germany and Great Britain. French law made it easy for thousands of colons, ethnic or national French from former colonies of North and East Africa, India and Indochina to live in mainland France. It is estimated that 20,000 colons were living in Saigon in 1945. 1.6 million European pieds noirs migrated from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. In just a few months in 1962, 900,000 French Algerians left Algeria in the most massive relocation of population in Europe since the World War II. In the 1970s, over 30,000 French colons left Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime as the Pol Pot government confiscated their farms and land properties.

In the 1960s, a second wave of immigration came to France, which was needed for reconstruction purposes and for cheaper labour after the devastation brought on by World War II. French entrepreneurs went to Maghreb countries looking for cheap labour, thus encouraging work-immigration to France. Their settlement was officialized with Jacques Chirac's family regrouping act of 1976 (regroupement familial). Since then, immigration has become more varied, although France stopped being a major immigration country compared to other European countries. The large impact of North African and Arab immigration is the greatest and has brought racial, socio-cultural and religious questions to a country seen as homogenously European, French and Christian for thousands of years. Nevertherless, according to Justin Vaïsse, professor at Sciences Po Paris, in spite of obstacles and spectacular failures like the riots in November 2005, integration of Muslim immigrants is happening as part of a background evolution and recent studies confirmed the results of their assimilation, showing that "North Africans seem to be characterized by a high degree of cultural integration reflected in a relatively high propensity to exogamy" with rates ranging from 20% to 50%. According to Emmanuel Todd the relatively high exogamy among French Algerians can be explained by the colonial link between France and Algeria.

In 2004, a total of 140,033 people immigrated to France. Of them, 90,250 were from Africa and 13,710 from Europe. In 2005, immigration level fell slightly to 135,890. The European Union allows free movement between the member states. While the UK and Ireland did not impose restrictions, France put in place controls to curb Central and Eastern European migration.

In November 2004, several thousand of the estimated 14,000 French nationals in Ivory Coast left the country after days of anti-white violence. There are 2.2 million French citizens, about 4 percent of the population, outside France.