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Olivier Esteves et al., "France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims" (Polity, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:06]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And today we get to talk about quite an intriguing book, published well in English at least By Polity In 2025, titled France, you love it, but leave it the Silent Flight of French Muslims, which takes on the very interesting phenomenon of people who are born and raised in France and are often highly qualified. Right. We're talking, for example, French instance, about nurses or doctors. But they decide once they maybe get to that point of finishing their education, to leave France to move to London or New York or Montreal or Dubai. There's all sorts of places that they go to. The question is why? And that is the question that the three authors of this book have investigated. So we have the team of Dr. Olivier Estevez, Dr. Elise Picard and Dr. Julien Taupin, who all it looked into this topic from a number of different specialties to make sense of what is going on. And I'm very pleased that we have Olivier with us today to tell us about this project. So thank you so much for joining us.
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A
Well, thanks a lot for having me around, Olivier.
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B
Thank you for being here. Could you start us off perhaps by introducing yourself and of course your co authors and tell us why you all decided to write this book together.
- [01:25]
A
Okay, so thanks a lot for asking me that question, I think. Well, I'd like to start by saying that it's actually an even more collective project than just the three co authors that you actually named. So there's the. I mean there was, there has been like almost 10 people, 10 academics from various disciplines actually working on this project, although there are only three names on the, on the book cover for various reasons. The reason why I started to investigate this question is first of all, as an academic dealing with race and immigration issues, mostly in the uk, at least originally, I have realized. And the other thing that is important is that I teach it at Lille, which has a train station, you know, taking you straight into London with the Eurostar. I have been hearing for approximately 10 years now of certain very good students, very bright students, young women who are Muslim who wear hijabs and who decide actually to go to London and never come back. Right. So these, a few students of mine over the past 10 or 12 years have had that kind of itinerary. And I was discussing this question with Julian Talbin, who's a colleague and friend from the same research unit as myself in Political science. And Julian Talpin actually deals with young people from French Banlieues, you know, housing estates, areas that are post industrial places with very few jobs available. And he's been interviewing dozens of people that keep telling him, well, as Muslims and as people originating from North Africa, we are, you know, we are discriminated against very badly in France. We can't find jobs because, because we're Muslims, because we have Arab sounding names, that sort of thing. And then ultimately, because the people that he is dealing with are not qualified, they never or they only very rarely decide to leave France. And so I just thought that there was big potential in this. And then ultimately when we published a sort of call for respondents in the media part, which is a sort of a well known, you know, online media in France, very early on we realized that we had struck something very, very massive.
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B
So that's a really helpful introduction to you and obviously the other co authors and people involved in putting this project together. And one thing that immediately comes to notice, in addition to the fact that there were more than one of you that worked on this, is of course the title of the book, which is quite attention grabbing, right? To repeat France, you love it but leave it. How did you come up with that title?
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A
Okay, so well, my co authors would agree with me in saying that I came up with the title myself. So well, I'm actually quite happy and somewhat proud of having come up with this title in the French language, which is La France tu les M, which also translates very nicely into English. So that's another major asset as far as I'm concerned. Okay, so there's a, there's an overtly provocative dimension in the title, quite obviously. Originally in the late 60s, Richard Nixon, former President of the United States, had a speech in which he said America, you love it or leave it. And by doing so he was actually targeting anti Vietnam War demonstrators. So there was, I mean on the face of it, there was little to do with, with race or with racism. And then across the Atlantic a few decades later, in the years 2006, 2007, 2008, Nicolas Arkozy, former president of France and radical right leader, as well as Philippe de Villier, who is a more sort of overtly racist kind of kind of politician, they actually used the phrase La France tu le France, you love it or leave it, which was really exhorting people who are French and Muslim to actually, you know, publicly sort of publicly show signs of loving France. And if they failed to do that, they were actually invited to leave the country, which obviously empirically doesn't make any sense because the vast Majority of the French, French Muslims were born and bred in France. Therefore, they are just as French as myself and Sarkozy and Tevillier, obviously. But with this title, what I think is quite interesting is the fact that through changing one single, very small, very stupid word, like or into, but. Right. Coordination, conjunction, it's called in French, conjunction, coordination. Right. I don't know how that translates into English language grammar, but it doesn't matter. The whole meaning has changed. The whole meaning has changed. And what I also find interesting about the title is that, you know, from the basis of that hunch of mine that I had at the beginning, we came to realize at a very, at a fairly early stage that this idea of France, you love it, but leave it, actually nicely encapsulates the general feeling that was shared by our interviewees. Those people were born and bred in France, the immense majority of them. Therefore, their popular culture is French culture. You know, they love French football teams. They have, you know, they have studied French history and literature. So there are many things about France that they are very happy with and familiar with. At the same time, they're also quite thankful of having grown up in a country where the education system, despite all its shortcomings, is almost completely free, and that includes the university system. So for those of them that today live in the UK or in the United States, of course, they almost daily realize, especially if they have kids of their own, that in the UK and in the United States, to student fees themselves are, you know, are massively expensive compared with France. So for all these things, they are very thankful. And yet they decide to leave France because for the vast majority of them, you know, they have failed to integrate the job market or they have suffered various types of discrimination on the job market, but not only. And as far as hijabi women are concerned, as far as women who wear the hijab are concerned, it's very clear that many sections of the job market in France are completely close to them. And so, again, this is something that I find important to tell and to repeat to people who don't know much about France and who are either American, Canadian or British. For instance, the fact that if you wear a hijab in France, 90, you know, 90% of the time, you know, the job market is virtually close to you. Okay, sorry, this was a pretty long answer.
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B
No, but I think it's important because as you said, it raises a number of themes that are going to come up in the rest of our discussion. But before we get into them further, I want to talk A bit more about these people you interviewed. Right. Because it's not just two or three or five people. This was a pretty big undertaking. So can you tell us more about who you talked to, how you got all this information?
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A
Okay, thank you. So, yeah, it was a pretty big undertaking. And to be honest with you, Miranda, I think we came to realize this at a fairly early stage when we published. So we had a. We published a call for respondents on media part, which is a well known, you know, media sort of online newspaper, which is the third, which is currently the third newspaper in France, right, just after Le Monde and Le Fil. So it's pretty influential. And it's the only, you know, it's the only mainstream newspaper that is not Islamophobic at all and which actually struggles against Islamophobia and exposes it in all sorts of ways. So we published a call for respondents with them. And then on the next day, Marwan Mohammed, who is a very high profile anti racist activist in France, anti Islamophobia activist in France. He was the founder of the Collective Against Islamophobia and France, which has been or. Which was fairly influential until it was disbanded by the former Home Secretary Gerald Darmanin under very flimsy. Under very flimsy sort of allegations. But anyway, no sooner had Marwan Mohammed actually tweeted our call for respondents that we were literally flooded with responses from French people who are Muslim and who live in various parts of the planet. So we immediately realized that we had come across something quite big there. And so we had a questionnaire. So we actually circulated a questionnaire with 38 questions and the last question was called to go further. So we invited people to give us their emails in order for us to organize a sort of biographical interview that could last for an hour or two hours or three hours. The longest of them will last about. Actually lasted for approximately four hours. So ultimately we came up with a questionnaire that was filled in exhaustively, comprehensively by 1,070 people. And then we also had in the updated version, which corresponds to the English language version published by Polity, we, we have 144, if I'm not mistaken, biographical interviews. So yeah, it is a pretty ambitious project, which did not necessarily start out to begin with as an ambitious project, but again, we were very lucky to have this call for respondents tweeted by Marwan Mohammed. If I can add a footnote to that, which is an important footnote, Miranda, obviously in such a research project there is a selection bias. So in the introduction to the book, we have a couple of pages trying to make sense of the extent to which this selection bias is an issue or not. Right. Clearly the fact that Marwan Mohammed tweeted the call for respondence means that among the Muslims that we talk to, there is a substantial majority of people who are highly educated, but who are also politically, politically aware, politicized, right, and also rather left wing than right wing, let's say, although quite a few of them have a sort of neoliberal ethos. But we make no bones about it. I mean, we are very honest about the fact that there is a selection bias in our research and the fact that it's completely exploratory. The fact that there has been no such research ever made in France means that hopefully next year, in two years time, there's going to be a more ambitious and a sort of less biased study than our study.
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B
Yeah, I mean, obviously every study of this sort of kind of talking to actual people and seeing who responds to your questions is going to have biases and it is important to include them up front, as you've done here and in the book. But of course there's still a lot we can learn from what the people actually told you. So getting into that, then you mentioned kind of one clear one already, which is women who wear hijabs being pretty explicitly excluded from many sectors of the workplace. What are some of the other key reasons that people who responded to the surveys or you interviewed gave for why they chose to leave France?
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A
Okay, so yeah, if we combine, starting with the hijabi women, if we combine three types of data from within the quantitative study, and I don't want to get deep into details because I'm not too sure I could do it right now, but anyway, we managed to sort of objectify the fact that there is massive discrimination against hijabi women on the job market in France. So that's one thing. Okay, then what we have realized is that in the quantitative study and in the interviews that we carried out. Well, let me, let me start talking about a minority of them, although that might sound a bit, a bit strange. There's a substantial minority of people that when we talk to them, especially in the interviews, they said to us, well, you know, I'm not really Muslim, I'm not really Muslim, but my name is Muhammad, or I'm not really Muslim, but my face, I look like an Arab. Keep in mind, please, Miranda, that for the people that listen to, to, to, to your show, they, yeah, in, in France, you, the tendency is to actually include a photo on your cv. So it's much easier for companies to actually discriminate against Arab looking or Muslim looking people if there is a photo on your, on your cv. And so those people told us, well, no, I'm not really Muslim, my father is a Muslim or my parents are Muslims, they are culturally Muslims. But I don't pray or I do Ramadan now and again, or I don't really do it, or some people also said, well, I like, you know, I enjoy drinking a glass of wine now and again. But the, the important thing is that they were perceived as Muslims on the French job market or they were perceived as Arabs. Of course, there is a clear implication, especially in France, between anti Arab racism and Islamophobia. Right. So that's one thing. The other thing is that I think we unearthed from among the people who are, who really, who sort of identify with Islam, people for whom faith, you know, obedience to a faith and identification to a faith is important. We sort of identified three types of itineraries. People whose careers were stopped by their Muslimhood, typically hijabi women. Right. So the fact that their careers were, were, were stopped then. People whose careers were, let me say, trammeled or bridled or. I don't know, I'm searching for words here.
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B
No, no, no, that makes sense.
- [17:03]
A
Okay, so whose careers were sort of bridled by their Muslimhood. In other words, people who actually managed to, to get jobs that correspond to their qualifications but who ultimately were facing a glass ceiling. People who told, who told us, well, I had been working so hard for this company, but there was a guy who arrived three years after me. He had been to a private night school, his name was very French sounding. He would go and, you know, have drinks, drink beer and drink wine. And in the various aperitifs that were organized. And that guy actually, you know, came before me when it came to getting, you know, getting sort of an advancement in my company. Right. When, when it came to getting a promotion. Right. So that's, that's what I call bridled careers. And then there's a third phenomenon which is probably more subjective and harder to identify, which I think we call in the book careers that were frustrated careers. In other words, people who don't seem to have been discriminated against on the job market. People who also, you know, climbed up the ladder of their own company quite nicely. But people who were very frustrated because within their company they would hear Islamophobic jokes, they would hear anti Arab statements, especially for instance, women, women wearing skirts, you Know, Muslim, sorry, Arab, you know, Muslim who. Sorry, women who have, you know, Muslim origins or our origins, who wear skirts, who drink alcohol and whose colleagues will tell them, well, you're not like the other ones. You are integrated. Of course, these women would have a problem with that because they would think about their own sisters or they would think about their cousins or some of the relatives or friends. And so, you know, by dint of repetition, through sheer repetition, this became unbearable to quite a few of the people that we talk to. Not to mention the fact that when these people came home, they would switch on the TV and then they would have a barrage of Islamophobic, you know, statements or comments or news on the mainstream, on mainstream channels in France. Right. So it's a combination of all of that, really. Another thing that I would like to add to sort of, you know, finish my very long answer, is that quite a few people also decided to leave France for sort of professional reasons or because they were seeking adventure abroad, because they wanted to, let's say, their English was not solid or their English was very weak, and they decided to go to London, you know, to have an internship or to work there for a year, and then ultimately they decided to stay. And many of these people, with hindsight, they would tell us, well, there were plenty of things in France that are regarded as normal, that are regarded. It was my daily life. I never put two and two together. But now, with hindsight, and now that I live in Toronto or Chicago, I now regard what happened to me in France as unfair, as not normal. And so they come to have critical distance of their own past in France. And I also think that that's something that hopefully we have managed to render quite well in the book.
- [20:33]
B
Yeah, I think that kind of realization after the fact is worth speaking a little bit more about, because one particular aspect that you discuss in the book, as people sort of explaining to you, was realizations about things that had happened in their formative years. So not even necessarily on the job market, but experiences of racism or discrimination during secondary school and things like that. Can we talk a bit more about those sorts of reasons, even the ones that kind of came to light afterwards?
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A
Yep. Yeah, so that's a very good question. And again, it's something that is a bit. I don't know whether it's counterintuitive, but it runs against a sort of a mainstream narrative. Mainstream narrative in France whereby, you know, the right. The school of the Republic has managed to integrate, you know, sons and daughters of immigrants by, you know, teaching them Specific values. Or there's also this myth of. I know they have this myth in Scotland because I lived in Scotland for a while a long time ago. It's, it's called the Lad of the Lad of Peart myth. It's the idea that you have a, you have a heart, you had, you have a hard working, very bright pupil somewhere, you know, in some village in the Highlands who does really well at school and who then is, you know, is, is, is found out by someone who will make sure that this person will, will, will climb up the social ladder, blah, blah. We have this very strongly Republican myth in France too. The idea that, you know, the, the, the sort of a pretty blind, pretty naive, I would say even conservative belief in, in, in meritocracy, right. And with this sort of universal belief in the typically French colorblindness. Well, if anything, our book, you know, shatters this myth, especially in its chapter two. It does seem that a large majority of the people that we talk to, they suffered from some kind of racism at school level, not only among pupils, but especially coming from some teachers. And I think that's, that's really quite a, it really is something that comes to the fore. I would say what we also try to identify is the extent to which after, after middle school, for instance, let's say this or that interviewee, when Young went to a state owned middle school within their neighborhood in a very sort of diverse, you know, multicultural neighborhood, and then they would go to a high school, you know, a few miles away from where they grew up. And in this high school, which is a sort of, you know, city center high school, let's say generally a public one, you know, a state, state financed one, they realized that they were the only Arab looking or one of the very few Arab looking or Muslim students. So it speaks volumes, if you want, about the degree of class as well as racial segregation within the school system. And of course, Miranda, it's super hard for me to try and give further details about this because you need to be fairly familiar with the technicalities and the specificities of the French schooling system and the differences between the, you know, the state owned schools and the private confessional schools. Just to give you a few details, France is one of the very few countries within the OECD to have a very heavily publicly subsidized private school system. And a large majority of the major decision takers within the French government or at the French assembly national, in the mainstream media, in the major companies, many of these people, they actually hail from private schools and of course, the people that we talk to, in a way they have been the victims of this sort of a very unfair, very unequal system, I would say. And the other thing that makes their upward mobility possible outside of France is that after the baccalaureate, once you, you get into higher education in France, there is a huge sort of prejudice against state universities in, on the job market. So it's the, really the, the expected thing if you want to work for a major company is to have been through what we call preparatory classes, les classes, and then you're supposed to have done one of those high profile, quite prestigious business schools or you know, engineering schools. And it's, it's the very French, it's, it's, it's the, you know, it's the French system, the way it's organized. And so if you have been, if you, if you have, if you hold a major, sorry, if you hold a master's degree, you know, in, in a state owned university in France on the job market, you know, it's, it's not that good. But what is fundamental is that once you leave France, if you go to Amsterdam, you go to Berlin, you go even to Brussels, which is next door to France, or Geneva, you go to Montreal, you go to New York, to Dubai. People, they don't know the specificities of the French system. So to them, these people, once they leave France, they have CDs that are perceived as, as much more remarkable than the way they are perceived in France. Because In France these CVs, they would, I would say they suffer from two issues. First of all, the name that appears on the, on the CV and the photo. Right. You know, I lead you again to, you know, to the, I refer here back to the questions of discrimination I mentioned earlier, but also of course, the, the kind of degrees that they've had from state universities. So it's a combination of everything really.
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B
Yeah. And obviously that makes a lot of sense. Right. Like people make big life decisions like moving to another country for a number of reasons. So is there anything else we need to understand in terms of all of these sorts of experiences coming together? People realizing them, feeling a negative impact from it that can happen without then someone actually moving to another country. Right. Because moving is a pretty big step financially if nothing else. So are there any other factors we need to think about in terms of what it takes for someone to go through all of those experiences, think about leaving and then actually do it?
- [27:24]
A
Yeah, so for quite a few people there's a sort of, there has been a sort of series let's say, you know, succession of micro events, right? Microaggressions. And interestingly, because, well, some of the interviewees that we talk to, they are pretty politically aware and some of them have come up with vocabulary such as microaggression, for instance. Not all of them have, but a few of them have at least. And so it's the succession of these microaggressions that lead some to think, okay, well, it's become unbearable. I can't stay in France anymore. So that's one thing. The other thing is, as I told you before, some actually did not really think that they were suffering from any specific discrimination. They left for professional reasons, that kind of thing. And then there's also what I find quite interesting in the book itself, and it's something that I barely realized to begin with, is the fact that some people actually had left France, had been living away from France for two or three years, others for one year, but others for five years, 10 years, 15 years, and some quite a. Well, a small number of them, but for at least 20 years. So it means that in some way our book can also read like a history of discrimination in France in the Fifth Republic, at least since, let's say, the end of the 1980s. So the, the triggering event for some of those people will not be the same, depending on what age they are. For instance, let me give you one example to make it clearer. When Sarkozy was president, he had a home secretary who's a great friend of Sarkozy. He was one of the few friends of Sarkozy's on trial recently over this whole scandal around Gaddafi in Libya. But that's another issue. His name is Brice Ortufeu, and Brice Ortufeu, coin made cracked, sorry, a very, very well known joke in France. He was talking to a young activist from the right wing party that they belonged to at the time, which was called ump, and he was saying, well, you're okay, you know, if there's only a few like you, this is fine. But when you get too many, it really becomes a problem. As they say in French, con lion ain sava, when there's one, it's okay. Mais c' est qu' y han a commence posait les problems. And so he cracked that joke and then it caused a furore in France. And we talked to people who said, well, when the Home Secretary made that joke, he was actually condoning, not even condoning, but even promoting that kind of racist joke all across the country. And so for someone to Be a minister. And to say something like that, keeping in mind, like as in the uk, the Home Minister, the Home Secretary or the Minister de Natarieux is also in charge of religious affiliations in France. Right. As we say Ministre des Cultes. And so some people that we talked to, at least I can think of three of them whose interviews are quite remarkable in the book, they said, well, when I heard that joke from the Home secretary, I was 23. I had just had my engineering degree. I was looking for a job. I couldn't find a job. And then I managed to get an internship in Brussels. So I grabbed the chance to go to Brussels. And then in Brussels I actually did really well and I got a chance to work in New York. And now I'm giving you this interview from San Francisco. I have been living away from France for 15 years. You know, it's that sort of narrative that we try to interrogate in the book. So, yeah, I would say succession of micro events in many cases. And then of course, sometimes there are much more so sort of traumatic events. Like 2015, the terrorist attacks. You know, we talked to a couple from Nice, you know, the, on the Riviera, and they were, they were holidaying, I think, in, in Malaysia. And it was 2016, the, the N. Terrorist attacks, which were, which were terrible, probably the, I would say, I mean it's, it's those terrorist attacks that at least on me have, have left the, the, the, the, you know, the, the deepest imprint. And so this couple that were really born and bred in Nice, they said, well, when those, when those terrorist attacks were carried out, we thought, well, we're going to come back to France, we're going to come back to Nice. We will feel and we will be even more, you know, singled out for blame for, you know, for, for plenty of things that we will, we will probably decide to leave. And ultimately this is what they did.
- [32:31]
B
Yeah. No range indeed. And the kind of building up of all sorts of things speaking then about where you interviewed people, as you mentioned, the example of Brussels, then New York, then San Francisco. Where were the respondents and interviewees living when you connected with them? What was the sort of range you found?
- [32:49]
A
Okay, so we have managed to identify the fact that they don't necessarily exactly always go to the same places, depending on whether we look at the, the quantitative study, you know, the questionnaire that I mentioned, or the, the, the interviews. But clearly the three, the three, you know, the three places of residence that are, you know, most commonly picked up by those people is the uk, Canada and the Emirates, especially Dubai. We, we haven't really managed to talk to that many people that actually live in Dubai, but people that live in the UK and people that live in Canada, we have managed to talk to many of them. The UK is by far the, you know, the most privileged place for geographical proximity reasons because the UK is seen as a, largely, it's perceived as a job market where racial discrimination does not, does not exist. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, but at least it's perceived like that. We can come, we can talk about that again probably later. And then also the fact that it's Anglophone, So quite a few people that we talked to, they were already, their English was already quite solid. So they had no problem with, you know, going to the UK and work there. Or on the contrary, their English was actually so. So as I said before, and then they thought, okay, if I want to boost my English skills, I may as well go to the, to the uk. So, yeah, the UK really, you know, has, I would say, four major assets. What I find interesting is that although, although a substantial number of the people that we talk to strongly identify with Islam, it wasn't, it wasn't seen as necessary for them. It wasn't seen as mandatory for them to actually go to a country that is a Muslim majority country. So that's another thing. They have felt that to go to the UK or to go to Canada, and this is exemplified by how banal prayer rooms are in many companies across the UK and Canada and the United States. They have felt, okay, we can be Muslims, we can adhere to Islam in the UK and in Canada in a way that we couldn't possibly dream of in France, and I really strongly insist on this. And so therefore, as a result, we don't necessarily need to go to a Muslim majority country to actually daily observe our faith. So that's another, I think, important element, another key element as far as I'm concerned, and this is something that I try to hammer within the team, because again, it's a collective project, is how strategic the neighboring countries of France actually are. If we want to isolate, if we want to, you know, you know, if we want to underline how exceptional France is in terms of Islamophobia, it's important for us to have a look at what is taking place next door. I'm thinking especially of places like Brussels or Geneva or, you know, Germany or we also talk to people who had lived or who were living in Italy or Spain. But because there were too few of them, we couldn't possibly generalize across samples that were really too small.
- [36:24]
B
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to understand that range. And obviously, of course, as you said, you have to be careful what you do with that information in terms of generalizing. But do we see any trends in responses based on where people have ended up? For instance, people that kind of all have ended up in the UK or Canada or Dubai, do we see differences in their sorts of responses based on where they've gone, or. Not so much.
- [36:47]
A
Okay, so this is the kind of thing that we try to look into in the first chapter, which is, you know, full of graphs and statistics and stuff. I would say the major. The most salient points, I would say is that those that seem to be very aware or very sensitivized about questions of discrimination, they are more likely to have gone to the UK or to Canada. And so those that we label the businessman, we use the masculine there because the majority of them are men, they will have gone, or they may have gone to Dubai rather than elsewhere. And also because of the way the immigration policies of specific countries are organized, we also realize that among those that were not as highly achieving, those with, let's say, the least impressive cvs, those that were not necessarily very highly qualified, they were much more likely to go to North Africa, sometimes to the places, the villages, the towns where their parents, that their own parents had left, or sometimes to Turkey. Erdogan in Turkey has been, you know, insisting a great deal on how Islamophobic France is and how many of these people are welcome to move to Turkey. And so we have realized that, yeah, Turkey serves, as it were, as a kind of magnet to quite a few of those French people, especially those that, you know, are not super highly qualified.
- [38:26]
B
I would say that's really interesting to understand, kind of, as you said, what the countries outside and around France are doing in response to. To this. Are there any ways in which you noticed that the process of leaving France changed how the people you spoke to felt towards France or feeling French? I mean, you mentioned earlier, in many cases, still following the French football team or things like that. Can we maybe expand that aspect of the findings out a bit more?
- [38:52]
A
Yeah, so this is what we tried to do in chapter five, which was fully authored by Julien Talbot. What we do is, what we do realize in this chapter is that for, I mean, most of them, again, have this sort of. They feel a kind of a bitter debt to France, right? We would say, yeah, they feel a debt towards France because, again, France actually raised them you know, they talk about the security, Social Security, talk about the schooling system, they talk about unemployment benefits that they can get in France, which they couldn't get to the same level in many of the countries that they actually have moved to. And at the same time, of course, the central fact of discrimination or Islamophobia, which is really at the heart of the departure of a majority of them. So this is something that I already talked about, as it were. What is also important is that through social networks, through Skype, Zoom, especially during COVID when much of the planet was actually closed, they have many, sometimes daily contacts with their families back home in France. So although quite a few of them have been trying not to follow the French news, they generally end up doing it. They generally end up following the French news. And of course, you know, they have been very depressed at, you know, the increasing, the escalating Islamophobia in France over the past few years. Many of the interviews that we had, we were conducted just before and during the 2022 presidential elections at a time when, you know, overtly Islamophobic presidential candidate Eric Zemour was sometimes rumored to actually be poised to win the elections. Of course, you know, the results were very different, but we couldn't possibly anticipate that. And so there was a, there was a real sense of a sort of something ominous coming from France. And of course, that happened before the reelection of Trump, for instance, or many of the issues that we have been seeing in Palestine and Israel. So in the updated version, which is the English version, really, we have tried, you know, in a fairly modest way to try, and we have tried to update many of these data with a few other extra interviews or, you know, elements that were added from former interviews that we had regarding the connection with France. What you must understand, Miranda, is that the immense majority of the people that we talk to, they are very close to their own, to their own family, their relatives, their family, their parents, their, their, their siblings are very dear to them. And so therefore, they always feel that they need to get abreast of the news because of their, of their, of their own folks living in France. I remember an interview with, with a convert. We actually, we actually do have quite a few convert converts. Sorry, in the book, we. We talked to a couple of converts. I think they live in Bolton, in somewhere close to Manchester in the UK anyway. And that young woman was telling us, well, incidentally, I have quite a few friends who are, like me, French and like me Muslim, but they are not converts. They are people originating from the Maghreb. And that woman was saying, it turns out that I'm the only person around my circle of friends who I'm very happy to have left my family behind because of. Well, it turns out that because of her conversion, her own parents were not talking to her anymore. And the same happened for her husband, who was also a convert, in fact, and let me just add this footnote. It wasn't always like that. Quite a few people who are converts and people that we talk to, they have remained quite close to their own family. But that single woman and her husband were telling us it's extraordinary how close to their families, people who are Muslim and who are French and who live in the Maghreb actually are. And so of course that means that it's a real pain. There's a sense of pain about having left France precisely because they have left their families behind. So one of the paradoxes is that they have, I mean, professionally, in many respects they are, and this is what we say in the book, they are a happy diaspora. But at the same time, there's also a sense of pain and a sense of loss. Of course.
- [43:45]
B
Yeah, no, that nuance is definitely helpful to understand, especially with the connections that remain within France in all of this massive project. Is there anything in particular that surprised you in figuring all of this out that you'd like to tell us, sort of behind the scenes, look at the process?
- [44:02]
A
Well, I would say the number of converts. Yeah. Again, this is also something that we tried to underline as the project was ongoing. And this is something we did. I mean, we unashamedly, you know, did a bit of racial profiling when we received these emails. Of course, if you receive an email which is like Sophie something, you end up thinking, okay, so that's got to be a convert. Right? Many of the converts that we talk to actually have kept their own non Muslim name, in fact. So, yeah, I would say the number of converts, although halfway through the project, we did make an effort to try to talk to quite a few converts. My idea was that conversion to Islam in France means that you were born and bred within the majority group. Therefore you have never suffered any discrimination at all. And then until you convert, where you become like the enemy, especially if you are a woman rather than a man. Because if you are a man, you know, you grow a beard, you look like a hipster, people believe that you drink IPA beer, but you don't drink any alcohol because you're, because you're Muslim. If, you know, if you're red haired or blonde haired, or you can pass off as non Muslim. But if you are a, a woman converting to Islam, I mean, all the people that we talk to wear hijabs. Therefore they are labeled as or seen as enemies. So I would say, yeah, investigating the question of converts was interesting to us and it does, I would say that it does echo remarkable research made in France by someone like Judy Galonier, for instance, who has been doing a PhD on, who did a PhD on converts in Chicago, in Paris, I would say. The other thing that I found interesting is having interviews with people who have left France for more than 20 years. And so people who have. People whose English, for instance. I'm thinking about two women in particular are both living in England. There's one living in Sheffield and another one living in Dulwich in South London and having interviews with them. And especially one, the one living in Sheffield had been staying in Sheffield since 1997. So she was saying, you know, the World cup of 1998, where there was this very naive and pretty ridiculous black, blonde, beur, you know, sort of multicultural, ethnically diverse celebration of France she had actually attended. Well, she had actually, you know, been following the World cup from across the Channel. So that, that, that, that to me was, was quite remarkable. And all the, you know, all the, the memories that she shared with us were, were quite, were quite interesting too, I would say. Too. Yeah. What we talked about earlier on, in other words, the, the kind of, you know, looking upon a past of discrimination in France with hindsight, you know, feeling that some microaggressions were like part of daily life. And then they never actually questioned that until, until they had been living away from France for quite a few years, that that was also an element that I found interesting. And also I think the, you know, the very pragmatic, very matter of fact accommodation of Muslim practices outside of France. I mean, the sheer banality of prayer rooms outside of France is something that we actually try to underline a great deal whenever we actually talk to the media and politicians in France by saying, well, if you look at how rare prayer rooms are in France, it does, you know, it is in itself an indication that there is a major problem of Islamophobia in France. It hasn't always been like that. I mean, I realized a few years ago with reading, you know, for instance, you know, the book by sociologist Hisham Benaisa that in the 1970s, when, you know, I'll try to make it short, when Algerian immigrants were working in car making factories, they were actually using prayer rooms. And it was something that was completely normal. And even, you know, the business interests actually promoted the praying, you know, the praying on the. On the. On the work premises, on. Because it made workers happy and it made workers not think too much about joining a union or that sort of thing. So, yeah, I think that these are the things that I found quite, you know, quite, I think, surprising in the book. Or these are things that I did not anticipate to an extent. I would say no.
- [49:08]
B
That's really interesting to hear about. Thank you for sharing your perspectives, being so embedded in this project. But of course, in many ways the project is, well, to some extent over. To the extent that the book is published in French and obviously now in English. So it's off your desk. You're still obviously talking about it. But is there anything else you're working on you want to give us a brief sneak pe of?
- [49:30]
A
Oh, yeah. So I'm just. Well, just about the project itself. I mean, my, my idea is that we, a lot of people that we talk to and other people as well, on media or quite a few, you know, politicians have been saying that we should try and launch the project in some way. I. I'm not sure that I agree that. I think what would be a remarkable idea would be for a film director or, you know, a showrunner, or, you know, if there could be like a series, you know, a, you know, a series inspired by our project or a film, I think that that would be a major thing or really a really good documentary could be made out of our project. But as you said yourself, Miranda, this is out of our hands now. I'm actually, I'm publishing in the French language with Lusoy, which is again, the, you know, the major publisher that we had. France love it, but leave it in the French language published with originally. So I co authored a book with Lynn Washington, who is a former journalist with a long career in Philadelphia and professor of journalism at Temple University, a book in the French language on the repression of MOVE in Philadelphia, which was a radically environmentalist movement that was massively repressed by the Philadelphia police and the Philadelphia City Hall. And, well, I could speak for hours about this because it's an extraordinary story and the book is called. It's like Let the Fire Burn, because the. In fact, the Philadelphia police used a helicopter in 1985 to literally bomb drop a bomb on a house which was where you found 13 members of this radical movement called MOVE. And nine, sorry, and 11 people actually died, including five children. And this horrid story is all the More extraordinary as the police forces themselves, they actually instructed the fireman present on the premises to, I quote, let the fire burn. So 65 houses were actually destroyed and more than 250 people were actually found homeless overnight. And so with this book, what I tried to do, what we tried to do with Lynn Washington is I unearthed plenty of interesting archives and we tried to have a sort of, as we say in French, you know, with specific chapters, looking at a specific angle of the, of this, of this extraordinary story. And Lynn Washington was actually present on the very day when the bomb was dropped. He actually saw the helicopter take off and the helicopter dropped the bomb. And he was, he's 75 now, so he's, he's been present at every single important moment in the history of this movement. So we've been doing this book together. It's been, although of course the topic that we cover is very tragic. It's been very fun to write a book on this with him, not least because we do it in French language. So I write the book and so I sort of, you know, fact check everything with him and then we, we have a look at how we can try and, you know, piece out this very complex jigsaw puzzle together and hopefully the book will be in English in about a year or something. Well, it's, again, it's in the publisher's hands, but I'm hopeful that we will manage to publish this book which is again, completely jargon free and hopefully it reads like a, like a thriller, like a novel. And so hopefully it's going to be out with an English language publisher in the not so distant future.
- [53:40]
B
Well, that certainly sounds like plenty to keep you busy. So while you're working on those various projects, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled France. You love it, but leave. The Silent Flight of French Muslims, published by Polini in 2025. Olivier, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [53:57]
A
Yeah, thanks a lot, Miranda. Thanks a lot.