Quantifying Social Division in France

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/world/europe/quantifying-social-division-in-france.html

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PARIS — France is divided in two, at least so said Prime Minister Manuel Valls in an unusually explicit speech last Tuesday. Not just divided but, as he put it, separated by a “territorial, social, ethnic apartheid.”

Those words came as a shock for a country that, a little more than a week earlier, had rallied by the millions in a show of solidarity after a rampage by Islamic extremists. Mr. Valls’s speech immediately set off a virulent debate, which he later admitted was his intention. It is important, he said, to have “the courage to call these situations by their own name.”

But to take the debate forward, France needs facts, and facts are sorely lacking in the decades-long discussion about integration, discrimination and French national identity. Questions about race, religion and ethnicity remain forbidden in the national census and are formally restricted in surveys conducted by government-sponsored researchers.

So who is divided from whom? Who belongs to which France? Those questions would seem to be a natural starting point for the discussion France is trying to have. Without reliable answers, the country is left with a range of wobbly estimates about, say, the number of Muslims — a figure that depending on the source oscillates from just over four million to six million, a significant difference for a total population of 66 million.

And yet for the moment, these questions are not on the table, according to Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, president of France’s data protection agency. “It is not a subject that has come up,” she told reporters from the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris on Wednesday.

The taboo against collecting data on race, ethnicity and religion stems from a Constitution that refuses to make distinctions among citizens presumed to be equal, and equally French. Some leeway is permitted — for instance, in establishing country of origin, or even nationality of parents, categories that some complain do nothing more than separate the French from the “less French.”

Patrick Simon, a researcher at the National Institute of Demographic Studies, has been repeatedly frustrated by what he sees as a fundamental contradiction — on the one hand, repeated references to race, ethnicity and religion in the public debate, and on the other, the absence of quantitative instruments to measure the populations everyone is talking about.

“If we want to understand the situation, we need statistics,” Mr. Simon said. “We have a problem that is not independent of the political approach to the whole issue. The question of statistics is just one element among others.”

Mr. Simon ran into opposition several years ago when he was preparing a landmark study, “Trajectories and Origins,” an examination of France’s diverse populations based on 22,000 interviews that were to be conducted in 2008 and 2009.

One question — “How would you describe the color of your skin?” — had to be pulled from the survey after France’s constitutional court ruled in 2007 that researchers could pose only questions that sought “subjective” answers. The collection of sensitive data, such as religious affiliation, can be authorized by the French data protection agency if the respondents give their explicit consent.

Mr. Simon’s research among 18- to 60-year-olds revealed a Muslim population in France of 2.1 million, which when extrapolated to the entire population produced a total of 4.1 million. That is far lower than the numbers typically thrown around, which are drawn mostly from such unreliable statistics as country of origin (for instance, French citizens of Algerian origin are not necessarily Muslim).

The argument against collecting ethnic or religious statistics is that they are essentially discriminatory, leading to divisions in society. But nobody denies that discrimination in France exists anyway: Racial or religious profiling as practiced by the police, housing agents and employers has been well documented.

Now even Mr. Valls is talking about “two Frances.” The next step, Mr. Simon says, is to gather reliable information on how, and why, France is divided.