Family life

If the Republic has always been an idea, has it not been abandoned to the defenders of a narrow vision of an ideal that is always revealed to be whiter, never secular enough, and that makes diversity and pluralism the supposed enemy of France? Totem of our political debates, the Republic is summoned to unite us. Yet it divides us, and the face of Marianne today embodies much more the ambiguity of an ideology than the supposed benevolence of an integrative universalism. At present, immigration, Islam and racial questions have been placed at the center of the debates on what makes (non-) France. Color, religion, “origin” have become markers of conformity, standards that speak of identity.

For Camille Robcis, the “French political model” is specific; it was constructed as a “republicanism” where

The nation is the expression of the will of the people, and elected officials must rise above their particular interests to speak in the name of the general interest. (p. 41)

Our republicanism “found its social expression in the celebration of the nation, its political expression in the rejection of intermediary bodies, and its regulatory procedure in the cult of the law” (ibid.). But for the author, this model “has lost its universalizing power and functions (today) as a tool of governmentality designed to circumscribe and defend the racial and sexual limits of the nation” (p. 19). Rather than focusing on migration policies to think of republicanism as “a tool of governmentality”, Camille Robcis suggests questioning our troubled relationship with the Republic, assimilation and difference by questioning another national passion: the family. Her book, initially published in 2013 under the title The Law of Kinshipis now available in an excellent translation: The Law of Kinship: Family, Experts and the RepublicThe author, a professor of history at Cornell University, brilliantly shows how a certain idea of ​​France was based on the defense and promotion of a particular form of family life, making the domestic universe a public issue and the defense of heterosexuality a republican duty.

The Little Republican Family

The historical critique of family morality and its articulation with national ideology is not a new undertaking. However, Camille Robcis sheds new light; as a historian of ideas, she takes as her starting point the arguments mobilized in the 1990s during the adoption of bioethics laws and especially the PACS. The rejection of the PACS was not only homophobia and conservatism; it was also the fruit of the fight of a few intellectuals, some of whom suddenly found themselves in the media (Françoise Héritier, Marcel Gauchet, Irène Théry, Sylviane Agacinski, Tony Anatrella, Pierre Legendre), for the defense of “society”. Heralds of heterosexual privilege, of the symbolic order and of the difference of the sexes, they sought to prevent the “unthinkable”, the “impossible” or even the “aberrant” from taking place: the legal recognition of partial equality through the creation of a civil union contract.

However, in France, and in a singular way, oppositions to equality have been characterized by a constant reference to structuralism, and mainly to two of its tutelary figures: Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. To summon structuralism, even though it is plural and diverse, was to import (and reduce) a system of thought into the political space to theoretically justify the conservation of a certain familialism, a restricted vision of the family model to defend and promote; it was to shelter behind the argument of the Law, of the Name-of-the-father, of invariants to justify the majority norm and inequality; it was to believe in the (self-proclaimed) capacity of things of logic to decree what makes culture against nature, civilization against barbarism and order against chaos. But it was also to defend a certain idea of ​​France, a vision of the Republic and a “national exception” where reason and law would have prevailed against the supposed “excesses” of the Anglo-American “model”, its naïve liberalism and its deleterious communitarianism. Defend the structure to save culture, call upon the Law to preserve law, appeal to the Republic to justify privileges.

Camille Robcis studies this singular form of entanglement between familialism and structuralism. She thus proposes a new history of familialism that allows us to understand how, in France, the defense of the heterosexual order was able to be articulated with a specific theoretical movement. By analyzing “what the texts question their contexts and vice versa,” she shows the “analogy” between two social contracts: that of the familialists and that of the structuralists (p. 35). However, if they “did indeed come together through the intermediary figures,” Camille Robcis does not presuppose “any cause-and-effect relationship between them.” The familialists did not necessarily read the structuralists; the structuralists were not directly inspired by the familialists. But all defended visions of society that overlap and come together, and that make the heterosexual family the keystone of our political and symbolic orders, and therefore of our Republic.

In the name of the fathers

The book is organized into three parts, each of which “interweaves political/legal analysis and intellectual/cultural history” (p. 34). The chronological division allows us to grasp the rise (part 1), the criticism (part 2) and then the return (part 3) of familialism. But the two centuries covered by the book are not treated in an equivalent manner. If the book opens with a rapid genealogy of familialism in law and social policies since the Revolution (chapter 1), the reader is invited from chapter 2 onwards to reread the first texts of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. Camille Robcis then devotes nearly 200 pages to the second half of the 20^e century, alternating between social history and textual criticism. The approach is ambitious; the author nevertheless responds to it, if we follow her in these constant back-and-forths between texts and contexts.

The analysis is first served by a real intellectual rigor: the texts are read, dissected, thought, including the most abstruse productions. C. Robcis deploys an original critique; she does not reduce intellectual positions to social positions but truly discusses the internal logic of the propositions. Throughout the pages, the reader grasps with renewed acuity the central paradox of the political uses of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan both produced a profoundly ahistorical system of thought, where – despite their divergences – “both authors present the symbolic as a category structurala universal outside of history” (p. 140). Now the symbolic creates order; it freezes; it makes a specific configuration necessary by taking it out of the world. Moreover, the symbolic – whether it is the prohibition of incest or the authority of the sexual father – appears progressively normative when it becomes referent. If Lévi-Strauss and Lacan sought to say what Man is, some of their readers relied on their theoretical models to prescribe the desirable form of family configuration required to satisfy the new laws of the universal. From then on, the symbolic becoming social,

The heterosexual family not only gives social cohesion and coherence, it is the universal and transhistorical “forced choice” that makes ethics possible. (ibid)

Thus, the political use of structuralist thought appears both as a theoretical misinterpretation, but also as the logical consequence of a fetishization of the symbolic which makes of a family the very condition of culture.

Bad pass

Chapter 3 deserves special attention, and truly appears as a pivotal moment in the demonstration. The author asks how “the construction of the family as a trope of social and psychic integration—what (she) called the ‘structuralist social contract’—came to be adopted in the political world” (p. 142). The circulation of ideas, here as elsewhere, requires facilitators, whom she calls “intermediary figures” (bridge figures). And Camille Robcis traces, through a real work of archival investigation, the commitment of a few individuals at the intersection of political and scientific spaces who interpret and appropriate concepts and notions to make them tools of social reform. These include Georges Mauco, whose influence Rémi Lenoir had already pointed out; Françoise Dolto, studied by Sandrine Garcia; but also, more broadly, institutions such as the High Committee of Population and Family, the Claude Bernard Center, the School of Parents, etc. So many individuals and places that make concepts exist outside their initial frameworks and produce, through a slow shift, an applied science where the analytical becomes prescriptive, the curative concept and the symbolic a social ideal.

Chapter 6, finally, reproduces in conclusion the same gesture of connection. Entitled “Alternative kinships and republican structuralism”, it describes how the judicial reforms of the 1990s – around the bioethics laws first, then the civil solidarity pact – revealed this analogy between two social contracts, at the heart of the demonstration of the work. The familialists are not structuralists; the structuralists are not familialists. And yet, all find themselves in the defense of an order that makes the heterosexual family the locus of civilization and built the Republic as its guarantor, thus entrusting to the law what can only be a source of discrimination: an “instituting function”.

For a new symbolism

There Law of kinship is a necessary book. It sheds new light on the violence of our current debates, and adds another stone to the useful critique of republicanist ideology. The attacks on the PACS seem distant today, and most of the left-wing intellectuals who were offended by civil unions have been able to adapt their indignation to the times, or even reinvent themselves as new advocates of a cause. LGBT became acceptable because it was republican. But the meticulousness of Camille Robcis’ work, her precision, her seriousness, her taste for text help to grasp the permanence behind the reversals.

Indeed, what was at stake then, and which continues to emerge, is much more a certain relationship with France, with what is now called “living together” – a soothing term which in reality conceals the very terms of a restrictive social contract. Camille Robcis concludes his work with a regret:

Assisted procreation and the civil solidarity pact offered the possibility of imagining a new symbolic – a symbolic that could have remained normative without necessarily being universal or transhistorical – but also, and perhaps more importantly, another concept of the social, of republicanism, and ultimately, of France. (p. 328)

The opportunity was missed, no doubt. But read The Law of Kinship can help us rethink ourselves, and perhaps, finally, stop celebrating Marianne without ever questioning her. It is not the Republic that we must deny, it is the use that we make of it. It is indeed urgent to question ourselves – as French people – not what differentiates us, makes us unique or identifies us, but what means must be deployed to reconnect with an emancipatory ideal and to build or rebuild an inclusive social contract, including – and perhaps especially – around the family.