In French, the word “déchéance” has several meanings, all of them bleak. It can refer to the fall of a civilization, or the degradation of the social fabric. More formally, it means the forfeiture of a right or a possession — one’s citizenship, for example. All three meanings, carrying echoes of the country’s experience under Vichy, resonate in a political drama unfolding in France.
Two weeks ago, the Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, delivered a stunning blow to the French revolutionary ideal that citizenship is no less indivisible than the republic itself. He announced at a news conference that his government would introduce legislation this year to amend the Constitution to allow the government to strip French citizenship from individuals who are found guilty of acts of terrorism — but only if they are among the three million French citizens who hold dual nationality.
Mr. Valls has the support of the leading conservative parties, the Republicans and the xenophobic National Front, but his own party exploded.
Speaking for several dozen fellow deputies, Benoît Hamon, a former government minister, described the measure as “inspired and supported by the National Front.” Among the Socialists’ erstwhile allies on the left, the outrage was even greater. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Left Party, denounced the “complete moral déchéance” of the government, while Cécile Duflot of the Greens called upon “all republican consciences to awaken and refuse to step onto this slippery slope.”
The news took even many in the Socialist government by surprise. The day before Mr. Valls’s announcement, the outspoken minister of justice, Christiane Taubira, dismissed the idea of such legislation as null and void. “It will fizzle out on its own,” she assured reporters, a statement echoed by other members of President François Hollande’s inner circle.
Skeptical reporters could be forgiven, because the original idea came from Mr. Hollande himself. When he convened both houses of the French Parliament at Versailles three days after the Paris terrorist attacks, he came with three goals: to reassure a shaken nation, reaffirm his personal authority and restrain the right’s ascendancy. In a Gallic variation on the Patriot Act, Mr. Hollande announced not just the extension of the state of emergency and expansion of the state’s ability to gather intelligence, but also the constitutional wrinkle concerning terrorists’ holding dual nationality.
At the time, few Socialist politicians, still in shock over events, took that last goal seriously. Mr. Hollande and Mr. Valls had vehemently opposed the same proposal when the previous president, Nicolas Sarkozy, embraced it in 2010. But with the National Front’s dramatic electoral gains in regional elections in December, things seemed to change: Successive polls revealing an overwhelming majority of French in favor of such a law most likely persuaded Mr. Hollande, whose approval ratings remain dismal, to carry out his original promise.
Yet for many Socialists, already embittered by his modest efforts to “liberalize” the moribund economy, Mr. Hollande was committing both a moral crime and a political blunder. His proposal would in effect create two classes of citizens, the lesser of which would enjoy the rights and duties of citizenship, but with the proviso that they could be legally withdrawn by the state. Hence the explosion of anger when Mr. Valls worried that his Socialist critics had allowed “grand values” to “lead them astray.” Christian Paul spoke for a growing number of Socialist deputies when he replied: “Those who forget their values lose their honor.”
Something else has also been forgotten, however. While the question of citizenship is no small matter for any nation, it has a particularly compelling role in French history and identity. The French Revolution invented the modern conception of national citizenship and formalized the ideal of civil equality. Thanks to its revolutionary heritage, France juggles a unique combination of “jus sanguinis” — where children inherit their parents’ nationality — and “jus soli,” where the soil one is born on, and not the parents one is born to, determines one’s nationality. (Children born on French soil to foreigners become citizens at age 18, if they don’t have a criminal record and have resided continuously in the country for five years.)
This makes perfect sense for a country like France: not only is it a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation supremely confident in its powers of assimilation. Until now, that is.
Mr. Hollande’s decision to hold fast to his presidential word is in fact a confession of weakness, an avowal that France has failed in its republican mission. It also undermines the status of three million Frenchmen and women by adding an asterisk to their status. This step, for some critics, is not unlike stamping the word “Juif” or “Juive” on the papers of French Jews under the collaborationist regime of Vichy, not to mention its stripping of citizenship in 1940 from naturalized French Jews.
These historical associations will be made in the debates between now and early February, when the government presents its bill to Parliament. Already, the political parties have begun circling around one another. Tasting blood, a vice president of the National Front, Florian Philippot, has demanded that the forfeiture of citizenship be applied to other, unspecified “grave crimes,” not just terrorism. Tacking left, a few Socialists have suggested that this punishment be extended to all French citizens convicted of terrorism. (This law, however, would collide with a 1961 international convention, signed but never ratified by France, that prohibits the annulment of citizenship if it renders the interested party stateless.)
As the debate sharpens over the next few weeks, more than one lawmaker will wonder what the Constitution’s founder would make of it. After all, 75 years ago last month Charles de Gaulle, who had left France for England to continue the war against Nazi Germany, was shorn of his French citizenship by Vichy.
Robert Zaretsky is a professor of history at the University of Houston and the author, most recently, of Boswell’s Enlightenment.