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The Cite Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration museum is at Palais de la Porte Doree, 293, avenue Daumesnil, 75012, Paris. For information, click on |
By Gregory Viscusi found at bloomberg.com
October 16, 2007
A new museum to celebrate the positive contribution of immigrants to France has been thrust into the center of an angry debate about national identity.
President Nicholas Sarkozy did not attend as the museum opened last week with a protest by its supporters at the lack of official recognition. New laws passed the same week to limit any influx of newcomers were described even by some in Sarkozy's own party as ``disgusting'' and evoking memories of the Holocaust.
France is the European country that has accepted the most foreigners, leading to decades of anti-immigration campaigning by National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. A quarter of all French have a grandparent born outside the country.
``France has always been torn between a sense of national identity and a
desire to be universal,'' said Jacques Toubon, a member of the European
Parliament and close associate of former President Jacques Chirac who heads the
museum's board. ``The issue of immigration has come in cycles over 200 years and
wasn't invented in October 2007,'' Toubon said in an interview.
Still, the timing of the opening couldn't be more auspicious, or awkward; the debate came to a head as the immigration bill passed the Senate. An amendment, to allow DNA testing of immigrants' relatives to prove family links, angered former Prime Ministers Edouard Balladur and Dominique de Villepin, as well as Sarkozy's Urban Affairs Secretary Fadela Amara. The president, speaking from a summit in Moscow, responded by asking everyone to ``calm down.''
The fuss threatens to overwhelm what's a relatively modest museum. Because France's migrants didn't pass through a centralized center such as New York's Ellis Island, it has no obvious home nor pre-existing collection of records. Instead, it occupies a building built for the 1931 colonial fair, whose collection of African and Oceanic arts has moved to the Quai Branly museum of tribal arts.
Personal mementos, such as the record collection brought by a Congolese arrival in the 1970s, the accordion-making equipment of a 19th century Italian, and personal belongings from a recently shut boarding house, are displayed throughout the open-plan space.
The story starts with Belgians and Germans in the 19th century, later including Italians, Poles, Spaniards and Portuguese. Immigrants from former colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa didn't become the immigrant majority until the 1970s.
Luc Gruson, the museum's deputy director, wants to encourage more families to donate old photos, ID cards and other souvenirs.
A group of historians first pushed for the museum in the 1980s. Governments of the left and the right weren't enthusiastic because they did not wish to provoke voters of Le Pen's National Front, said Patrick Weil, a demographer who has advised the museum. It was Chirac who in 2002 gave Toubon the green light for the idea.
``France is a nation of immigration while the U.S. is a nation of immigrants,'' Weil said. ``France has always received immigrants but it has an old core with an historical presence. Every American knows he's descended from somewhere else.''
Sarkozy, who is stepping up expulsions of undocumented workers, had a father from Hungary and two grandparents from what was then Ottoman-ruled Greece.
``It's about time that France recognizes its immigrants, but it's shocking to have this opening against a backdrop of quotas, expulsions and DNA,'' said Eric Lafon, a curator at a history museum in suburban Paris, Musee de l'Histoire Vivante in Montreuil.
While the immigration and culture ministers made separate private visits, no formal inauguration is planned for the moment. Toubon said there might be one later.
Lafon and a group of about 100 activists decided that since the museum wasn't having an official inauguration, they'd have their own where they brought their own drinks and cut a symbolic red, white and blue ribbon.
See the official site : immigration museum
To contact the reporter on this story: Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@bloomberg.net ;
Last Updated: October 16, 2007 23:47 EDTrelated french museums with african art and African culture
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