This summer, in a park in Joliette, I worked on my tennis shots with my ball machine. This machine always arouses children’s curiosity. That evening, therefore, a seven-eight year old child entered the court to observe this and to help me pick up my 75 balls. We chatted a little. He told me his name was Mohammed and he went to the local school. Her little sister came to join us, but was unable to participate in the conversation since, having not started school, she only spoke in Arabic.
When I returned home, I told myself, filled with optimism, that everything was there: if we want immigration to be an opportunity and not a threat for Quebec, we must go out and meet new arrivals, welcome them warmly. , speak to them, in French, like friends, offer them life with us, who have been there for a while, like a common adventure. I’m not afraid of Mohammed and his little sister. On the contrary, I would like to hear them say “the rest of us”, when talking about Quebecers, in ten years.
I know very well that one does not enter into politics with such good feelings and that the integration of newcomers does not go without challenges. My anecdote is simply intended to illustrate that I do not adhere to the “great replacement” theory and that I believe in the possibility of successful integration of immigrants, subject to compromises on both sides.
In The declinists (Écosociété, 2023, 152 pages), essayist Alain Roy, director of the journal Disadvantage, harshly criticizes the discourse of certain intellectuals opposed to immigration, especially if it is Muslim. Renaud Camus, Alain Finkielkraut, Éric Zemmour, Mathieu Bock-Côté, Michel Houellebecq and Michel Onfray are in his sights.
Roy criticizes them for lacking intellectual rigor, for sketching alarmist scenarios in disregard of statistical data and for having no credible solution to propose to the problems they deplore. These essayists, he writes, add fuel to the fire by fueling Islamophobia.
Roy is right on target regarding Camus, Zemmour and Houellebecq, when the latter forgets to be a novelist. Here, in fact, are three troublemakers ready to say anything to make themselves interesting, even if it means fueling a climate of civil war in France at the expense of Muslims.
Currently, immigrants represent 10.2% of the French population. People of Muslim culture represent approximately 8% of the population. Among them, only 25% claim to be practicing. We are far from the “great replacement”.
In Quebec, 3% of citizens are Muslim. According to demographer Guillaume Marois (The Journal of Quebec, September 4, 2018), if current immigration trends continue, Muslims will represent 14% of the population in 2061. In the unlikely scenario where culturally Muslim immigration doubles, citizens who identify with this faith would represent 19 % Population. Thus, Marois concludes that “Quebec is not on the path to becoming a Muslim society”, while adding that it must remain intransigent towards manifestations of political Islam.
Alain Roy is therefore right to describe the “great replacement” thesis as delusional. His critics, however, sometimes cut corners. Roy, for example, says correctly, noting that Bock-Côté, who will not fail to defend himself, is more of a polemicist than an essayist, in the sense that “his thought [est] entirely determined by its premises. However, this is also the case for Roy himself.
As proof, I take the treatment he reserves for Finkielkraut. The latter, it is true, has sometimes had unfortunate formulations in this debate. Nevertheless, accuse his essay The unhappy identity (Stock, 2013) of Islamophobia is unfair. Contrary to what Roy asserts, Finkielkraut does not write that Muslims are “unassimilable citizens.” He notes that cultural diversity sometimes bleeds into culture shock, but he adds that “none of these differences are immutable” or insurmountable. He underlines, further, that adopted French people, in 1940, joined General de Gaulle in his fight for France and quotes Lévinas saying that the latter “is a nation to which we can also be attached by the heart strongly than by the roots.
Finkielkraut also insists that it is “imperative” not to “make all Muslims pay for Islamic radicalism”. With Claude Lévi-Strauss, he pleads both against “the ethnocentric temptation to persecute differences” and against “the penitential temptation to free ourselves from ourselves to atone for our faults”. It’s defensible.
This is also how I want to welcome Mohammed, fraternally, but without shying away.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game),
essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.