The Lost Generation: The Third and Fourth Generations and France's Identity Crisis
Originally published (in Arabic) on: WordPress.
When a person loses his roots, and a society loses its compass
I. A Silent Tragedy
There is a silent tragedy being lived by some of the new generations in France, a tragedy that appears on the news only when it explodes, and then falls silent again once the streets calm down. It is the tragedy of the third and fourth generations of immigrants: people born French, who have held French citizenship since birth, who sat on the benches of the republican school, and who learned the language of Molière, the history of the Revolution and the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, yet who have not always found their full place in the society into which they were born.
Some of them no longer master the language of their grandparents, and know of their original culture only scattered fragments of family stories and the rituals of special occasions. Their religious affiliation may be closer to an inherited identity, proclaimed and revived when needed, than to a genuine knowledge of the faith and its spiritual and intellectual heritage. At the same time, they feel that the society into which they were born does not always recognise them as fully French, so that in the eyes of some they remain "children of immigrants", however much time passes and however many generations follow.
This is a person who may lose touch with his roots without succeeding in building an alternative belonging. He is neither a son of the shore his grandparents came from, nor entirely at ease on the shore where he was born. He lives in a grey zone, suspended between a memory he no longer possesses and a future he does not feel he is a true partner in shaping.
II. Uprooting and the Soul's Need for Roots
In London in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote her book "The Need for Roots" (L'Enracinement), published after her death. It contains her famous line: "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul." Weil was not speaking of roots as a romantic nostalgia for the past, nor as a withdrawal into oneself, but as one of the conditions of a sound human life: that a person take a real, active part in a community that preserves certain treasures of the past and carries certain expectations for the future.
Weil saw uprootedness as one of the most dangerous diseases of modern societies, and held that the uprooted tend towards one of two fates: either a spiritual lethargy resembling death, or a rush into activity that often seeks to uproot others in turn. Harsh as it is, this idea sheds light on part of what we see today: a person who finds no ground to stand on may withdraw into himself in deadly indifference, or his pent-up anger may turn into a desire to tear down what he does not feel he belongs to.
Roots are not a shackle; they are what allows the tree to rise. Without roots, the tree does not become freer, only more liable to fall at the first wind.
III. The Republican Model Between Promise and Test
This crisis cannot be understood without understanding the French model itself. The French Republic was built on an idea that is noble at its core: citizenship is a bond between the individual and the state, not between communities and the state. A person is a citizen before being the child of a sect, a race or an origin. Hence the famous words attributed to Count Clermont-Tonnerre before the Constituent Assembly in 1789, when he called for granting the Jews everything as individuals while refusing to recognise them as a nation within the nation. That is the essence of republican philosophy: full equality for individuals, in exchange for no political recognition of communities.
On this basis rested the idea of integration, or assimilation in its older form, and the republican school was its great instrument: a free, compulsory and secular school that turned the children of peasants, workers and immigrants into citizens sharing a language, a history and values. Then came the law of 1905 separating the churches and the state, enshrining secularism (laïcité) as a founding principle that guarantees freedom of conscience and keeps the state neutral towards beliefs.
Yet this model rests on an implicit contract: the individual sets aside particular affiliations in the public sphere, and in return the Republic grants him a wider and higher belonging, a belonging to a nation with a history, a culture and a meaning. If the Republic keeps its promise, letting go becomes a passage towards a richer identity. But if a person is asked to give up his roots without being given, in return, a living belonging, social dignity and a horizon for advancement, the contract breaks down and integration turns into emptiness.
The problem here does not lie in the republican principle itself, but in its ability to remain alive and convincing. A principle not sustained by a daily experience of real equality turns into a slogan, and a slogan does not create belonging.
IV. The Paradox of Total Liberation
Here, in my view, one of the deep philosophical contradictions of contemporary France emerges. Some leftist and globalist currents push individualism to its extreme and put forward conceptions that go beyond the traditional boundaries of sex, national identity, family and religious affiliation, as if human liberation could only be complete once a person is freed from every inherited reference point.
But what remains of a person when he is asked to free himself from everything that gives him a sense of continuity and belonging? A human being is not an isolated atom reinventing itself every morning, but a creature born into a language he did not invent, into a family he did not choose, and into a history that preceded him and will outlast him. A freedom that denies this truth does not liberate a person; it leaves him alone with himself.
As early as the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville, in the second volume of his work on democracy published in 1840, was alert to this danger. He distinguished between selfishness, an ancient instinct, and individualism, a calm and considered feeling that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends, leaving the larger society to look after itself. He warned that democracy may constantly throw each person back upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
Closer to our time, the philosopher Charles Taylor observed in "The Malaise of Modernity" that the ideal of "authenticity", being true to oneself, is a genuine moral ideal, but that it degenerates when cut off from the shared "horizons of significance" that give an individual's choices their value. If everything becomes merely a personal choice, choice itself loses its meaning. Before him, Christopher Lasch, in "The Culture of Narcissism", had diagnosed a modern person freed from ties yet more anxious and fragile, searching for himself everywhere and finding himself nowhere.
Liberation that begins by breaking unjust chains is a virtue. But liberation that turns into breaking every bond ends with a person without support, and a society without a soul.
V. Durkheim and the Spectre of Anomie
At the end of the nineteenth century, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim spoke of "anomie", or normlessness: the condition in which the rules and bonds that give a society its cohesion, and that regulate individuals' desires and aspirations, grow weak. In his famous study of suicide he showed that this phenomenon, seemingly the most individual of acts, is at bottom linked to how far a person is integrated into the group and how well ordered the norms governing his life are.
For Durkheim, man does not live by bread alone, nor by rights alone; he needs a shared moral framework that defines for him what is reasonable, possible and desirable. When that framework collapses, a person does not become freer; he becomes prey to limitless desires and bottomless disappointments.
The question today is this: has extreme individualism produced a freer human being, or a more isolated one? And is not the young person who stands between the culture of his grandparents, which he no longer knows, the culture of a society he does not feel embraces him, and a society that tells him at the same time that all reference points are relative and open to deconstruction, the clearest embodiment of the anomic individual Durkheim described?
VI. The Black Bloc: A Crisis of Another Kind
Here another phenomenon appears, different in nature but worth reflecting on: the Black Bloc groups.
A clear distinction must be stressed here: this is not a movement of immigrants, and it has no structural link to the young people of the banlieues. It is a radical form of protest adopted by groups of a predominantly anarchist and far-left character, whose members dress in black and mask their faces, and who sometimes gather across European borders to attack symbols of power and capitalism.
These people are not necessarily looking for a lost national identity; some of them reject the legitimacy of the political and economic system itself. Their problem is not that they cannot find their place in the nation, but that some of them do not recognise the nation or the state as a legitimate framework at all.
In France's recent unrest, violence and vandalism surfaced alongside broad social protests, although it has not been established that all the masked groups belonged to the Black Bloc. Intellectual honesty requires that we not confuse the peaceful protester with social demands with the vandal who sees violence as an end in itself.
So we find two different crises: a crisis of belonging among some young people, and a crisis of legitimacy among radical currents that reject the established order. Yet, different as they are, they meet at one point: the erosion of confidence that this society holds a shared meaning worth respecting and defending.
VII. Against Reductionism
Yet reducing the children of immigrants to lostness or violence would be a grave error, both moral and intellectual. Many of them have succeeded in building a coherent French identity and in combining the culture of their grandparents with French citizenship. They are doctors, engineers, teachers, business people, artists, athletes, soldiers and public servants, carrying France in their hearts just as they carry the memory of their families, without seeing any contradiction in that.
They are the living proof that integration is possible, and that identity is not a zero-sum equation: a person does not have to erase his past in order to embrace his present, nor reject his present in order to stay faithful to his past. An identity at peace with itself is one that knows how to weave a single belonging out of many roots.
Hence stigmatising an entire group because of the acts of a few serves only the extremists on both sides: those who want to convince the French that the children of immigrants are a permanent danger, and those who want to convince the children of immigrants that France will never accept them.
VIII. A Crisis Deeper than Immigration and Wider than the Left
The problem is deeper than immigration, and wider than the left alone. It is the crisis of a society asking what holds its members together now that shared reference points have receded, social inequalities have deepened and trust in institutions has weakened.
The "native" French young man in a forgotten rural town may also experience a sense of marginalisation and loss of meaning; the worker who sees his factory close may feel the nation has abandoned him; and the citizen who trusts neither the parties, nor the media, nor the elites may retreat into isolation or into anger. The crisis of belonging among some children of immigrants is only the sharpest face of a broader crisis that affects the whole French fabric.
When the family weakens, religious and moral authority recedes, the school loses its standing and national history becomes the object of constant doubt, a person, whatever his origin, finds himself facing a void that is filled by whatever is at hand: consumption, the screen, hardline identities, or violence.
IX. What Makes Millions One People?
France does not only need to reform its economy or secure its streets, important as those are. It needs to answer anew a founding philosophical question: what makes millions of individuals one people?
Ernest Renan posed this question in his famous 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, "What Is a Nation?". He refused to reduce the nation to race, language, religion or geography, and saw it as "a soul, a spiritual principle" resting on two things: the common possession of a rich legacy of memories, and present-day consent, the desire to live together and to continue to value the shared heritage. Hence his enduring phrase: "The existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite."
The genius of Renan's definition lies in joining past and present, memory and will. The nation is neither a mere administrative contract between free individuals, nor a mere frozen inheritance imposed on the living; it is a shared memory that people adopt by their own will and renew their commitment to every day. But this daily plebiscite presupposes two things: that there be a heritage worth adopting, and that every citizen feel genuinely invited to the ballot box. If the heritage is dismantled in the name of liberation, or some citizens are excluded from feeling they share in it, the plebiscite loses its meaning.
The state can give a person citizenship and rights, but it cannot, by law alone, give him a sense of belonging. Citizenship is written in registers; belonging is written in hearts. And between the register and the heart lies a distance that only real education, social justice, mutual respect and an inclusive national narrative, one that excludes no one and is not ashamed of itself, can cross.
Conclusion: Recovering the Compass
Here lies the crisis of the French model: how can we build a cohesive nation if we cannot agree on what unites its people?
The answer does not lie in a return to an identitarian closure that sees every difference as a threat, nor in an escape into an absolute individualism that sees every belonging as a shackle. The answer, in my view, lies in recovering the balance that made European civilisation great at its best moments: faith in the dignity and freedom of the human person, together with the understanding that this person is only complete within a community, a family, a nation, and a spiritual and moral heritage that gives him meaning.
Simone Weil taught us that man needs roots; Durkheim taught us that society needs shared rules; Tocqueville warned us of the solitude of the democratic heart; and Renan reminded us that the nation is a will renewed every day. All these lessons say one thing: freedom that is not built on belonging collapses, and belonging that does not respect freedom suffocates.
The lost generation is not an inevitable fate. It is a question addressed to all of France, to its elites, its schools, its families and its institutions: does it still have meaning and hope to offer its children, all its children? Young people are not lost because they reject belonging, but because, very often, they find nothing to belong to.
When the nation regains its confidence in itself, and dares to tell its children who they are, where they came from and where they are going together, only then can a person find his roots, and a society recover its compass.