PARIS – Naomi Delophont longed for a Black community in her native France. When she studied abroad at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, she felt able to show pride for her identity as a player on the school’s rugby team, where Black athletes’ success was explicitly celebrated.
Back home in France, returning to her studies at Sciences Po, Delophont struggled to see that same type of representation.
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“In France, since we don’t want to speak about race, we are just trying to say, ‘we are colorblind, we are all the same,’ even though the experience is totally different,” says Delophont, referring to the unequal treatment people of color experience.
Census questions about sensitive data, including race, ethnicity or religion, have long gone unasked in France. This falls in line with the country’s culture of universalism, which views all citizens as equal under law, united by the same nation. That same culture is also expressed by the concept of laïcité, France’s strict separation between church and state, which goes as far as banning religious symbols in certain public spaces.
This culture was put in question when this past January, France’s statistics bureau INSEE added an optional question to the national census: Where were your parents born? In a blog post, INSEE said the new question “will make it possible to account for the diversity of the population and document questions of residential mobility between generations and spatial segregation.” In response, a coalition of five organizations, including the Human Rights League (LDH) and Movement Against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples (MRAP), released a joint statement calling for people to boycott the question, arguing it was “dangerous, unnecessary and unacceptable.”
Delephont is ambivalent on this issue. Although she wishes her country did more to recognize race, she has reservations about trusting the government with information on her own ethnic background. “I’m never sure about what the government’s going to do with that data,” Delophont says.
“Race blind” republicanism
To some international spectators, France’s universalism is seen, as described by Delophont, as systemic colorblindness. “Officially, France is race blind, which means that it’s not going to implement laws or procedures that take into account race as a valid category,” says Dr. Beth Epstein, an anthropologist specializing in race and social inequality in France and academic director at the Paris campus of New York University.
Instead of religion, race or ethnicity, people are defined by one shared identity: French.
This “blind” approach was born out of the French Revolution, when the burgeoning Republic was challenged with constructing a nation state amidst a diverse population. This gave rise to French republicanism, the idea that “it is essential to create a nation state whereby there is a sense of belonging and a sense of common purpose,” Epstein says. Still today, France has “a deeply felt attachment to this Republican ideology, which puts an emphasis on the importance of the collective,” she says. Instead of religion, race or ethnicity, people are defined by one shared identity: French.
This extends to official government data. “The French approach with regard to race has been to treat any consideration of race as illegitimate, and therefore to regard state collection of data about race as illegitimate,” says David Oppenheimer, an American UC Berkley Clinical Law Professor who has taught at the University of Paris I, University of Paris X and Sciences Po Paris.
In recent years, discussions of racial inequality from some on the left in France have drawn increasing attention, spurring a national panic over the rise of le wokisme. Still, the idea of confronting discrimination with government statistics is, to many, a frightening one that requires France to confront a dark history and foreboding present, as the far right is gaining ground.
France’s history with ethnic statistics
In France, the collection of ethnic data evokes a particularly uncomfortable period of the country’s past represented in le fichier juif (“the Jewish file”). The Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis to deport nearly 76,000 Jews to concentration camps was enabled using public statistics collected on the Jewish population. It is worth noting that demographers have found that population registers, which specified names, were more useful to the Nazis than census data in deportation, but government statistics did play a role. The collection of ethnic data also resurfaces memories of colonization, in which the French empire collected “colonial statistics” to keep track of the number of indigenous colonial subjects.
Today, the wound remains tender. Delophont says questions about her own race and ethnicity, including the new question on parental birth place, still scare her. “In history, that data was used in a bad way,” Delophont says. “I’m just scared that it could be used for targeted actions.”
Jan Robert Suesser, an LDH National Office member, similarly cautions that, rather than fighting discrimination, census data on people’s parents’ birthplace could be used for sinister motives by the far right, an increasingly present threat in France since the Rassemblement National (RN) party swept the first round of the 2024 legislative elections. To Suesser, statistics on disparities relating to people born to non-French parents of foreign origin will be used to say “it’s normal not to like them,” justifying discriminatory attitudes towards migrants.
Epstein says the far right’s historic discourse of “France for the French,” championed by Jean-Marie Le Pen, former president of the RN’s previous iteration, the Front National, and father of current RN group leader Marine Le Pen, has made issues of ethnic background feel “hot to touch.”
The French government has not done much to dissuade people’s fears. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who was recently elected head of the center-right party Les Republicains, said he’s in favor of ethnic statistics as long as they are not used for “positive discrimination,” leading left-wing politicians to argue he wants them to be used to disadvantage already marginalized groups.
Survey v. census
The collection of data on race, ethnicity or religion, among other categories, was officially outlawed on Jan. 6, 1978. Although the French state still largely neglects race and ethnicity, today, there are exceptions that allow the collection of sensitive data for statistical and research purposes.
Much available information on France’s population makeup comes from surveys done by INSEE as well as INED, the French Institute for Demographic Studies, which is a public organization linked to the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Social Affairs. In surveys, French people have been asked about their parents’ place of birth for two decades. Despite this, the same question proved fairly controversial when added to the census, even optionally.
For its part, INSEE argued the question was a necessary addition to the census because, unlike surveys, it would allow a greater amount of population data to be collected at a more detailed geographic level than surveys allow. “Since issues of segregation are often local, it is important to have precise information,” says Muriel Barlet, head of INSEE’s demography department.
“Statistics measure inequality. They do not measure discrimination.”
LDH, one of the groups that called for a boycott of the question, is not opposed to questions on parental origin in research surveys. Suesser argues that while surveys and research studies can demonstrate the effects of discrimination, and in turn combat it, census data alone can not. “Statistics measure inequality. They do not measure discrimination,” Suesser says.
From his perspective, census data showing discrepancies among people of different backgrounds does not inherently prove discrimination, as this inequality could be explained by a variety of factors. Investigations, research and surveys, however, can allow for the examination of inequality among people who, aside from one factor like gender or ethnicity, share the same profile, potentially proving discrimination.
“The idea that numbers will help us make policy, that’s absurd,” Suesser says. “We need tools that are much more political than numbers.”
Are numbers enough?
France is far from the only country to avoid questions on ethnicity in the census. Italy does not ask census respondents about race, and Germany has even faced criticism for its resistance to ethnicity data, though it does ask about “migration background.” However, people from Anglophone countries, typically accustomed to marking their own race on government forms, can find perspectives like Suesser’s baffling.
To Oppenheimer, without census data, opponents can argue that existing research on inequality is “unreliable.” Oppenheimer sees France’s reluctance to ethnicity questions in the census as part of the larger unwillingness to examine inequality while claiming “French” is the only identity that matters. “It’s a grotesque violation of the French principle of universalism. It is the worst kind of hypocrisy,” Oppenheimer says.
He is far from the only onlooker to criticize France’s attitude toward race and ethnicity statistics. Hoewever, some French scholars argue that the Americans are the hypocritical ones in their defense of census data. “Of course there is discrimination in France. Of course there is police racial profiling, there is housing discrimination, but no more than in other countries,” says Jean-Luc Richard, a researcher and professor of European sociology and demography at the University of Rennes.
It is difficult to compare inequality in France directly with other countries like the U.S. and UK, where ethnic statistics are collected. Yet when it comes to some common discriminatory experiences, like disproportionate checks by the police, figures indicate that problems persist with or without census data. A study published in June by France’s human rights watchdog found that young men who are Black or perceived as Arab or North African are four times more likely to be checked by the police. In England and Wales, from 2019-2020, Black people were nine times more likely to be inspected by the police than White people, according to official figures.
“We don’t collect information about people’s racial identity or racial background because we don’t want to know about inequality.”
Even so, Oppenheimer argues persisting discrimination is not a justification to not collect statistics on inequality. Compared to the U.S., where there is an understanding of the country’s demography and inequalities, in France, he says, “we don’t collect information about people’s racial identity or racial background because we don’t want to know about inequality.”
To Epstein, however, the census debate isn’t so clear cut. In the U.S. census, which has five race options, the information gleaned on the population can still be limited. “People are being smushed into categories that don’t really reflect their story and their family’s history,” Epstein says. “It can give us a snapshot that feels meaningful, but we always need to ask the question: What is this allowing us to see? And, what is it keeping from you?”
