Abstract
Civilizations, cultures, societies, races, castes, classes, milieus, ethnic groups, religions, systems of thought, customs, habitus... The categories that are supposed to differentiate human groups and their ways of thinking and acting favour highly variable scales, which tend to establish as many hierarchies. The debate on the selection of migrants periodically reactivates the question of the hierarchy of origins, measured against the yardstick of the Western value system. We recall the French Minister of the Interior who caused a stir in February 2012 by arguing that "all civilizations, all practices, all cultures, with regard to our republican principles, are not equal", and who castigated the "relativist ideology" of his opponents. In particular, social science disciplines that attempt to understand differences without judging them are targeted.
We'll return to this controversy and others that punctuate our cultural history: the difficult integration of the conquered provinces during the 19thcentury , likened by Eugen Weber to the action of a colonial empire; the "duty of civilization" towards the "inferior races" proclaimed in 1885 by Jules Ferry; the antagonism between French "civilization" and German Kultur rekindled at the start of the Great War; the unsuccessful attempts to sort migratory origins according to degree of civilization (naturalization law of 1927, ordinances of 1945); the growing stigmatization of African migration; the fear of globalization threatening the sovereignty of civilized nations... We'll also look at the recent introduction of a reference to the "values of the Republic" in legislation applicable to two categories of new arrivals: schoolchildren and new immigrants.
The comparison of these various episodes will be based on a reasoned use of lexicometry. This will enable us to relate two avatars of the theory of modernization and progress: the thesis of the "civilization process" forged on the eve of the Second World War by Norbert Elias, and the thesis of a migration from South to North engendered by disparities in development and perceived as both logical and threatening to "our civilization".
