Media Minds: How France Writes about Muslim Footballers

Background

Why France?

France has the largest population of Muslims in Europe, and stigmatization, discrimination, and fears of the unassimilable “other” are highly prevalent. This is because the French perceive Muslims as possessing identities that challenge the common historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds and identities of the French.

France has a long history of close relations with the Catholic Church, which identified Muslims as the enemy beginning with the First Crusade where Christianity was pitted against Islam. Later, when France took colonies in North Africa, interactions with locals written from the French perspective described France as bringing progress to North Africa and “saving” the indigenous people from ignorance and Islam. In the Algerian war for independence from France in 1954, Algerian guerrilla groups drew most of their rhetoric from Islam, which gave rise to French resentment and fears of North African Muslims.

Why study Football (soccer)?

Sports as Integration Tool

Scholars have done a lot of research on sports as a tool of government to promote physical health, national or community pride, and social integration. Even watching elite sports, such as the FIFA world cup or the Olympics, can be a tool for integration and community-building.

Sports as a Promotor of National Identity

Athletes as Symbols of the Nation

Minority athletes who win for France are a symbol of successful social integration. For example, when France won the World Cup in 1998, several Muslim players, including Zinedine Zidane, were key reasons for success. Broadcasts of winning minority athletes were symbols of a reinvented French identity: a multi-racial, multi-ethnic identity. The team’s, and Zidane’s, victory for France was viewed as reassurance that immigrants had integrated into French society and fit into French identity. Zidane singing the national anthem was perceived as a sign that he was more French than anything else. French people want a multicultural France without divisions, without communitarianism complications, and Zidane’s blood, sweat, and tears poured into a French football victory symbolized that he belonged to France, not a other religious, ethnic, or cultural communities.

The victory in 1998 was an opportunity for France to point to it’s national team, a victorious team made up of native French players and minority (specifically Muslim) players, and say: “We’ve done it. France is multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious.” But that was not the reality within France. It was merely an illusion France sold to the world, and often to themselves.

Anti-Muslim Sentiment in France

Anti-Muslim sentiment is evident across Europe in right-wing rhetoric, media coverage, and opinion polls. For most of French conservative society, Islam is a religion that is culturally incompatible with French society and values.

Despite, or perhaps because, of France’s long history as an immigrant-receiving country, many French people harbor fears over losing their national and cultural identity. One of the words they use to manifest this fear is communitarianism (communitarianisme).

Communitarianism is the development of ethnic, religious, cultural, and/or social communities. In France, communitarianism is typically understood to be contrary to French Republican values. This is because communitarianism permits minority groups to create distinct and separate communities that make specific political demands. As such, the French perceive minorities who form communities as dividing the nation to the detriment of integration, i.e. the French fear members of that minority community will be more loyal to their community than to France. Thus, the French tend to condemn the formation of any distinct communities, so all people will be loyal to France.

Muslims tend to retain strong ties to their Muslim communities and therefore are perceived by many French as not being first and foremost loyal to France. France’s experience with some of its youth being radicalized by Islamic fundamentalism in the past decade has only exacerbated and justified their fears of communitarianism as they see young people raised in France choose political Islam over France.

My Goal

Strategy

Findings

Many French people and the French media praise the French team as a symbol of the multicultural quality of French society, yet minority players are often represented, particularly when they perform poorly, through racialized discourses that show both the existence of persisting colonial undertones in society and an illusory acceptance of multiculturalism.

The questionnaire also showed evidence of these discourses, showing they either already existed in the French subconscious or the media influenced them. The presence of these patterns in both the media and French opinion suggest that they reinforce each other. It is likely that without conscious effort these stereotypes will remain for some time. These discourses, especially existing on the subconscious level, are very damaging in that they stereotype and generalize all the diverse peoples of a religion or ethnicity, and create binaries that reinforce French superiority and “Eastern” inferiority. So, they probably tell us more about the French than about the groups they are supposed to represent.

I found five patterns of minority athlete discourse in the French media, which I termed symbol of integration, notional acceptance, brawn versus brains, orientalism, and clash of civilizations.

Notional Acceptance

Notional acceptance has two parts. The first is when a player is doing well, he is accepted as a member of the dominant nationality, but when he performs poorly, he is marked as “other.” The second aspect of notional acceptance is the idea that players with different origins, or who might be viewed as having different origins from the dominant nationality, must work harder to assert their patriotism. Sometimes they also must reach higher benchmarks than a member of the dominant group in order to be recognized or included.

While notional acceptance is usually reserved for individual players, I observed a similar pattern on a national scale. When Les Bleus perform well, they are a symbol of a positive France, when they do not perform well, they represent a France torn by racial and ethnic divides. A journalist for Le Monde wrote: “a victory and it is successful integration; a defeat and it is the absence of binding, the rising communitarianism.”

Therefore, the acceptance of immigrant players is dependent on their performance and behaviors, and the acceptance of the team in its entirety as a symbol of a successfully multicultural France is also dependent on the performance of the team. France appears as a country under tension, willing to throw its weight behind highs and lows because it lacks a comfortable and stable middle ground.

Symbol of Integration

Elite football players, by means of how much time they devote to football, are model minorities, as they spend the majority of their time in pursuit of what is, essentially, French glory. This is the ideal of integration for France: minorities who join pre-existing French structures, like the football team, and dedicate themselves to it while espousing French values rather than foreign values. Zidane, for example, is the ultimate French integration symbol because he brought the French team to victory and never challenged the state, never used his position to effect change. Instead, this son of foreigners dedicated himself to France and the French team. He’s the perfect symbol—all for France.

Brawn vs. Brains

The category “brawn vs brains” denotes the ethnicization or racialization of certain characteristics, specifically that Black athletes are described as successful because of their strength and physicality while white players are characterized as successful because of intelligence and/or hard work.

One article quoted Bordeaux coach, Willy Sagnol: “The advantage of the typical African player…is a player who is ready for combat, who can be described as powerful. But football is also technique, intelligence, discipline.” This coach stereotyped the African player as powerful, a physical trait, and then used a qualifier to discuss other aspects of football—technique, discipline, intelligence—as qualities that this “typical player” does not possess. This suggests that one cannot possess both physical capabilities and mental capabilities.

A Le Monde article discussed a survey carried out in 2010 where participants were asked what they believed were the specific qualities of Black people. The answers showed that 22% of French people selected physical and athletic qualities while only 3% answered intellectual capabilities. This duality between athleticism and intelligence is insidious when it is generalized and applied to race. The binary between mind and body is further damaging to minorities because the French have a tradition of valuing mind over body. For example, Enlightenment philosopher Rene Descartes discounted the body entirely when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” Thus, not only is physical ability associated with intellectual inferiority, but French society values mental ability far more than physical ability.

Minority players are often accepted first in the world of sports, probably because of these one-dimensional stereotypes that depict them as physically superior and more inclined towards aggression. However, this early acceptance into a physical element of French society before any other sectors of society only reinforces the brawn versus brains stereotype. Therefore, while any acceptance of the minority by the majority can be deemed progress, this form of acceptance perpetuates negative stereotypes at the same time.

Orientalism

A theater stage director interviewed by La Croix said of Zidane’s headbutt: “Zidane responded to this violence of speech with another violence, dragging, by his immediate visceral reaction, his whole camp with him towards disaster. Instead of postponing revenge until later, he did not find the strength to control himself.” This representation of Zidane implied that he got carried away by his visceral need for revenge, that he was unable to prevent himself from headbutting Materazzi. The article reinforced the racial stereotypes of North Africans as having savage or barbaric behavior, such as letting base instincts and emotions drive one’s actions.

Orientalist discourse is insidious in that it continues to reinforce ideas that Muslims and minorities are inferior to the French, as was the narrative during colonialism. Additionally, language referencing the irrationality, savagery, and beast-like nature of Muslims and minorities marks these minorities as incompatible with French society, and, in fact, suggests that including these “barbaric” people in society may ruin or sabotage the civilized, rational, and enlightened nature of French society.

Clash of Civilizations

The above category, Orientalism, mainly focuses on the portrayal of the East as barbaric and the West as civilized. In instances where the two were presented in direct opposition, I included those articles in a separate category called clash of civilizations, based off of Samuel Huntington’s theory that future conflicts will be driven by cultural and religious identities rather than between countries.

For example, Zidane’s 2006 headbutt against Marco Materazzi was one instance where journalists applied clash of civilization rhetoric. One article used Orientalist discourse when describing Zidane as a hot-headed player who “blew his fuse.” Materazzi was presented as “a villain in the Italian league,” but it was Zidane who was blamed for “falling into his (Materazzi’s) trap.” These two players were presented with Orientalist rhetoric: hot-headed Zidane from the “East” and calculating Materazzi from the “West,” and they were pitted against each other in a clash of civilizations. However, not all articles about this event were portrayed with this racialized language. This is probably partially due to the somewhat unconditional acceptance of Zidane by some of the French media.

In 2010, a journalist wrote that “the players split up according to their membership in Islam (Ribéry, Anelka, Abidal) or their skin color, by rejecting the too French Yoann Gourcuff.” Another article characterized Gourcuff as a “little white man lost in a foreign land.” These examples presented France in opposition to minorities through the lens of the relationships and ethnic lines of the national team.

Conclusion

That the French praise their national team as a symbol of multiculturalism and a reflection of the multiculturalism of all of French society is in direct contradiction to the presence of the stereotypes and racialized representations I listed above.

In post-colonial French society, these patterns of defining and understanding have remained the normative way of thinking. An additional problem with these representations is that they erase diversity by characterizing all Muslim or North African minorities within the same stereotypes, which denies minorities of their complexity. Certainly, many French people are not racist, and of those who are, most of them likely do not intend to be. However, in many ways, the unintentionality of this language makes the presence of these stereotypes and practices even more insidious because it means that these ideas are unconsciously rooted in French society.

Therefore, the national teams in 1998 and in 2018 were ways for the French to acknowledge that people look different (race, ethnicity), but simultaneously not accept any differences in terms of culture, beliefs, and values because those things are not abundantly obvious on the football field. It was clear that the French did not embrace difference in 1998—did not embrace true multiculturalism—because the headscarf affair had been enflamed again only four years earlier and would again become a major point of contention in the early 2000s.

Thus, the national team represented a surface-level multiculturalism where the French could pretend to embrace the ideology of multiculturalism like other European countries at the time, but maintain their belief in integration and assimilation rather than accept differences.

The existence of these patterns of representation can also help to explain why the French are so reluctant to accept Muslims and minorities as French. Not only do the clash of civilizations and Orientalist discourse suggest an inherent difference between Europeans and those from the “East,” but these discourses also hold that Muslims and Blacks are less intellectual and easily succumb to animal passions and uncivilized behavior. The last thing the French—descendants of rational enlightenment thinkers—want is to be considered those things. In fact, to define is to differentiate. Thus, by marking minorities as uncivilized and intellectually inferior, the French can identify themselves as rational and superior.

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Disclaimer: several photos are mine, but others were taken from Unsplash.