We had not heard the formula in meetings since the flights of Jean-Marie Le Pen. At the Zénith de Paris, in front of 7,000 people, on Sunday February 13, Valérie Pécresse proclaimed: “I want to make French people at heart, and not just French people on paper”. Earlier, she had cited, from the fourth minute of her speech, the racist and conspiracy theory of the “great replacement” – expressions directly from the register of the far right, first anti-Semitic at the end of the 19th century.e century, then xenophobic since the 1920s.
This formula, “Paper French”, distinguished French say “strain” and naturalized citizens. Nationalist circles use it more widely once morest French people of foreign origin, suspected of being less attached to their country, in a rhetoric that opposes the ” heart “to denote patriotic sentiment, and a supposedly deceptive administrative state.
Originally, the expression “French stamped paper” would have appeared under the pen of the essayist Albert Monniot, collaborator of Free Speech, the anti-Semitic journal of Edouard Drumont. It then designated Jews of foreign origin who obtained nationality following applying on stamped paper, recalls historian Emmanuel Debono. In his anti-Semitic pamphlet Jewish Francein 1886, Drumont described the Jews as “French by name and not by heart”. Charles Maurras, father of integral nationalism and French Action, critic in La Cocardea newspaper edited by Maurice Barrès in 1894, “ this piece of paper what is “a diploma of naturalization”. And presents the French as ” the prey of any Barbarian, of any Metec who it pleases to take the trouble to enter their home”.
“No soul, no true belonging”
In 1922, the nationalist newspaper The newspaper relay ” the doubt “ weighing on the newly naturalized Alsace-Moselle, described as ” from “paper french”, French people on paper » with a “heart remained German”. In 1927, Le Figaro is alarmed that a law facilitating the naturalization of immigrants is creating ” thousands of “French stamped paper” » : “the naturalized foreigner becomes a complete citizen, can we read ; he has the same rights on the land of our ancestors as we do..
In The Great Replacement, in 2011, far-right ideologue Renaud Camus, who supports Eric Zemmour, targeted Muslims who “say they are not French except on paper, no heart, no soul, no real belonging, and feel more this or that than French”. He then suggested “that their wishes be heard, that their administrative situation be brought into line with their feelings, that French nationality be withdrawn from them”.
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