The cultural history of Arab and North African immigration to France is on display at the country's national museum of immigration, writes David Tresilian in Paris Opened two years ago in a building originally designed to house the 1931 colonial exhibition, a high point in the promotion of French colonialism between the two world wars, the remit of France's Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration, a national immigration museum, is to raise awareness of the history of immigration into France. Whether it has been able to play the kind of national role predicted for it, "changing the way people think about immigration and making it a question that can be looked at rationally," as its director, Jacques Toubon, put it when the museum opened, is a moot point, and it is not clear that the challenges facing the new museum, identified in the Weekly in October 2007, have yet been met. Nevertheless, for those willing to make the journey out to the Cité's rather distant location, perched on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes in south-eastern Paris, the reward has been a stimulating series of temporary exhibitions and other events linked to the experience of immigration. The most recent of these events, G énérations, un siècle d'histoire culturelle des Maghrébins en France, an exhibition of the history of Arab and North African immigration to France from the 19th century onwards, runs until April 2010. Organised by a French NGO, the exhibition focuses on the "cultural history of North Africans in France" and the ways in which such populations, originally from the Arab Maghreb countries of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, have been represented in mainstream French culture and the cultural expressions -- music, film, art and literature -- that they have developed for themselves in France. While it is possible to feel that the exhibition is unnecessarily coy about some of the material on display, perhaps the absence of any keener exploration of what has sometimes been at stake -- the experience of discrimination, racism and, for many, continuing social and economic marginalisation -- is not unexpected in an exhibition housed in what is, after all, a state institution. However, the exhibition nevertheless does succeed in tracing the main lines at least of Arab and North African immigrant culture in France. It begins in the 19th century, when first Algeria and then Tunisia and Morocco were colonised by France. The first section deals with the first nationals of these countries to live in France, revealing that thousands of North African workers, chiefly from Algeria, were already at work in mines in the north of France on the eve of the First World War or were working on construction projects elsewhere, among them the Paris metro. Their numbers later increased during the war itself, when nearly 300,000 soldiers and some 130,000 workers from the Maghreb were mobilised to assist in the French war effort. The exhibition contains many striking images from this period, restoring a sometimes forgotten component of French national memory. However, it was only after the end of the war and during the 20 years of peace that followed that immigration from France's North African colonies really began both to take off and to change in character. More than 400,000 North Africans came to France between 1921 and 1939, many settling down as their predecessors had not, and it was during this period, too, that Arab and North African culture began to take root in the country with the appearance of the first North African singers and sports stars, the foundation of religious institutions and the Paris mosque and the growing number of North African students at French universities. These helped encourage nationalist consciousness in their countries of origin, with both Habib Bourguiba, later leader of the Tunisian independence movement the Neo-Destour, and Messali Hadj, founder of the Etoile nord-africaine, one of the first Algerian nationalist parties, being students in Paris in the 1920s. As evidence from this period the exhibition includes examples of the administrative and other documents issued to North African workers at the time, confining them to their areas of work. The 1950s were marked by the independence of Tunisia and Morocco in 1956 and the increasingly bitter struggle for independence in Algeria. Represented here by photographic and other materials testifying to the overflow of the Algerian national struggle into metropolitan France, with curfews being imposed on North African workers and increasing levels of police and other violence, these were also years in which North African popular culture began to make its presence felt in music and sport and when pioneering North African writers and painters began to achieve wider recognition. The exhibition's last two sections, covering the period from 1962 to 1983 and from 1983 to the present, include testimonies of life in the bidonvilles, the slums surrounding the major French cities in which many North African workers lived until as late as the 1970s, and the industrial and other conflicts that intensified from the 1970s onwards when the end of the post-war boom spelled rising unemployment and the end of large-scale immigration into France. With the end of such immigration, and the phenomenon of second-generation immigrants, who, born and educated in France and having French nationality, did not have the same relationship to North Africa as their parents, came the new visibility of North African populations in France. This is signaled in the exhibition by memories of the Marche des beurs, a 1983 march from Marseilles to Paris to protest against racism and demand equal rights, and by the widening circulation of French North African culture, including Mehdi Charef's 1985 film Le thé au harem d'Archimède, one of the first examples of "beur cinema," and the work of Franco-Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, whose 1987 novel La Nuit sacrée won the Prix Goncourt. The exhibition's final images are of the smiling faces of today's French sports and show-business stars of North African origin, presented against an aural background of pop group Carte de Séjour's 1983 reworking of crooner Charles Trénet's song Douce France. (Carte de Séjour means "residence permit.") The implication seems to be that the cultural and sporting success of such people indicates a revolution in attitudes and the transformation of North African experience in France. The exhibition undoubtedly makes for a useful survey, even if it relies almost exclusively on photographs and video displays, presumably for reasons of cost. It is always more expensive to borrow original artifacts and more difficult to guarantee their correct display. However, more seriously the exhibition's underlying narrative, inviting visitors to follow a story-line that takes them from arabes to beurs, from unassimilated minority to glittering success, says too little about individuals wanting to find careers outside the glamorous, but narrowly based, areas of sport or popular music. Reflection on minority experience in the United States should make clear that the success of high-profile individuals says little about the lots of those who are less lucky or less talented. Images of football player Zinedine Zidane, television personality and comedian Jamel Debbouze and politician Rachida Dati say something about the possibilities now open to French citizens of North African origin, but little about the lives of the vast majority of their compatriots. Fortunately, anything missing from the exhibition itself is more than made up for in the accompanying catalogue, more like a book, which consists of a collection of illustrated essays by some 30 authors, most of them French but with a sprinkling of American and other contributors. More comprehensive and more nuanced than the exhibition it accompanies, this is likely to become a reference work in its own right. It contains material on North African writers in France, such as Driss Chraibi, Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar, on French North African films and film-makers, and on the actors, television personalities and singers who have been responsible for the development of beur, or Franco-Arab culture, among today's French young people of Arab and North African origin. Among the essays of particular interest are those that excavate unusual aspects of the history of North African culture in France or that search out its overlooked corners. Yvan Gastaut, for example, contributes an essay on Arab characters in French crime novels, detecting a sea- change between older forms of representation, for example in the work of Léo Malet whose nouveaux mystères de Paris series of the 1950s tended to identify urban crime with immigration, and the "new crime novel" of the 1970s, which used the form to examine the workings of an unjust society. In a similar vein, Driss El Yazami contributes an essay on the golden age of North African music in France in the 1950s and 60s, when singers such as Mohamed Jamoussi, Mohamed Lamari and Mohamed Fouiteh, working with French labels such as Pathé-Marconi, La Voix de l'Orient and Baidaphone, were able "slowly to free North African music from its Egyptian stranglehold," often starting out in North African cabarets that were little more than rooms attached to the Algerian cafes that had grown up in French cities between the wars. A further essay by Naima Yahi examines the contributions made by female singers such as "la Jeune Ouarda," later "Warda El Djazairia," who, born in Puteaux outside Paris in 1939, went on to marry Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi and "took on the mantle of Umm Kalthoum." There is an interesting essay by Thomas Lacroix on the development of the "Arabe du coin," the North African corner shops that are a fixture of French cities in the same way that small shops and restaurants owned by people originally from the Indian sub-continent are in Britain, and another by Naima Yahi on "ethnic humour," being the success, going back to Smain in the 1980s, of French comedians of North African origin. According to Yahi, Smain's 1986 one-man show, "A Star is Beur," marked the beginning of a trend that today has reached its apotheosis in the celebrity of Jamel Debbouze, the impresario behind the Jamel Comedy Club, and Gad Elmaleh. Smain himself is quoted as saying that his celebrated sketch "le beur president," in which he plays up his Arab origins while pretending to be president of the French republic, at least means that "the message is there: why not an Arab president?" Regarding the meaning of the word beur, this was originally French slang for Arab, but over recent decades it has been reclaimed from its pejorative origins. Many French young people today, and not only those of North African origin, commonly listen to Beur FM, a radio station playing North African styles of music, or watch football matches played by French teams made up of players describing themselves as "black- blanc-beur" and films and television programmes starring celebrities such as actor Samy Naceri or Debbouze. One measure of the changes brought about in wider French culture by the cultural and sporting success of such figures has been the fact that whereas in 1993 the novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun pointed out that "the children of North African lawyers or doctors are not called beurs because they have been brought up in better circumstances. 'Beur' means the suburbs, problems, the difficulties of becoming a part of society and so on," when the well-received film Indigènes was being made in 2004 the French newspaper Le Monde put Naceri and Debbouze on the cover of its weekly magazine, describing them as "nos stars beurs." According to Alec Hargreaves, a professor in the US who describes this change in his essay in the catalogue, the difference in the article -- "'les beurs' of the past have become 'our stars' of today" -- goes some way towards indicating "the profound development, still unfinished, in the cultural presence of North Africans in France." That message is the storyline of the present exhibition. However, in order to arrive at a comprehensive view, going beyond the stars of sports or show business, one still needs to read the accompanying catalogue. Générations, un siècle d'histoire culturelle des Maghrébins en France, Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration, Paris, until 18 April 2010
