The Mitterrand Regime and Its Policies of Ethnocultural Accommodation

Abstract

political and intellectual elite. This Jacobinism had defined democratic rationalism in terms of universal aspirations, viewed the enlarged and centralized nation-state as the ideal vehicle of progress, and looked upon tribes, provinces, and other intermediary units as retrogressive and destructive of democracy. The reasons for the eclipse of this ideology, which cannot be discussed in detail here, have been varied: the demystification of the French (majority) culture; the spread of transnationalism; the departure of integrative hero figures; inefficiencies of centralized government; and the temptation to react to the social disorientations of industrial society by retreat to more comforting, if less rational, social relations and by quest for autonomy.' These developments have generated among the public authorities willingness to accommodate the cultural aspirations of native ethnic minorities which has, in turn, spilled over into accommodationist attitudes toward other subcommunities: nonterritorial ethnics, nonethnic provincials, and immigrants. After the events of May 1968, the French democratic Left began to question the conventional wisdom of monolithic cultural centralism. Speeches and writings of Socialist intellectuals and politicians, often taking the cue from the analyses made by the Parti Socialiste Unifie, reflected growing perception that Jacobin cultural centralization was Parisian matter; that the suppression of peripheral ethnic cultures had been convenient for the promotion of capitalism; and that the end of alienation and the spread of democratic participation could be furthered only under new forms of autonomy which implied all kinds of decentralization, administrative, economic, and cultural.' When the Socialists campaigned for the presidency in 1981, they were committed to tolerant and pluralistic approach to the peripheral ethnic communities within the hexagon, an approach that would culminate, in the words of the Projet Socialiste, in a flowering of regional cultures and languages that constitute one of the riches of the French cultural patrimony.' To some extent, both the arguments and the proposals of the Socialists were built on foundations laid by previous governments. In the Fourth Republic, the Deixonne Law (1951) had legalized the teaching of certain ethnic languages in public schools (without these languages