Olivia Miljanic and Robert Zaretsky: France and the Gypsies, Then and Now
[Olivia Miljanic is a lecturer at the University of Houston. Robert Zaretsky is professor of history at the Honors College, University of Houston, and with Alice Conklin and Sarah Fishman, author of “France and Its Empire Since 1870.”]
Many commentators and activists have reacted with fury to the French government’s expulsion of hundreds of Roma, or Gypsies, to Bulgaria and Romania. Many critics liken these expulsions to the deportations of Jews organized by France’s Vichy regime during World War II. It’s hard to know what is more outrageous: the policies practiced by President Nicolas Sarkozy or the analogies proffered by his critics.
Yet in the history of modern France, the wartime Vichy regime has no monopoly on xenophobic reflexes and exclusionary policies. Over the course of the 20th century, it was French republican governments that laid the administrative and legal foundations for official discrimination against Gypsies....
Thinkers from Plato to Tocqueville have commented on the dangers inherent in the rule of the majority — especially when the majority is swayed by the passionate actions and speeches of the few. The lot of Gypsies in contemporary France and Romania is a case in point. While these states do not subject their Roma populations to the punitive policies pursued by Pétain’s France or Ceausescu’s Romania, they do relegate them to the margins of their societies....
Read entire article at I.H.T.
Many commentators and activists have reacted with fury to the French government’s expulsion of hundreds of Roma, or Gypsies, to Bulgaria and Romania. Many critics liken these expulsions to the deportations of Jews organized by France’s Vichy regime during World War II. It’s hard to know what is more outrageous: the policies practiced by President Nicolas Sarkozy or the analogies proffered by his critics.
Yet in the history of modern France, the wartime Vichy regime has no monopoly on xenophobic reflexes and exclusionary policies. Over the course of the 20th century, it was French republican governments that laid the administrative and legal foundations for official discrimination against Gypsies....
Thinkers from Plato to Tocqueville have commented on the dangers inherent in the rule of the majority — especially when the majority is swayed by the passionate actions and speeches of the few. The lot of Gypsies in contemporary France and Romania is a case in point. While these states do not subject their Roma populations to the punitive policies pursued by Pétain’s France or Ceausescu’s Romania, they do relegate them to the margins of their societies....