The White Minority: Natives and Nativism in Contemporary France

Abstract

In 2009, a nativist association named AGRIF sued antiracist activist Houria Bouteldja for “anti-white racism.” Though unsuccessful in court, the legal proceedings against Bouteldja are illustrative of a decades-long phenomenon that has accelerated in the age of new media: the recuperation of antiracist discourses by nativist activists who claim that white people constitute a minority in France. This article tracks the emergence of French nativist discourses from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular attention to identification with the figure of the colonized in the colonial archive and in the nativist discourses that have accompanied decolonization in France. Anchored in the history of France's prized settler colony, Algeria, the colonial genealogy of French nativism offers lessons for the study of nativism in other (post)colonial contexts.