A bakery in Avignon where a Malian apprentice worked was tagged with "nègre," the French equivalent of the n-word and then set on fire. A French-Moroccan self-employed nurse in the south-western Occitanie region had a patient cancel a visit after answering a question about the origin of her surname. A bus driver in the Paris region was called by the racist term "sale bougnoule". French-Algerian shopkeepers in Dijon and Black shopkeepers in Perpignan received racist letters demanding that they leave: "I advise that you prepare to leave for Africa," "Get the hell out and don't come back."
Since the announcement of the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale on June 9, racist acts, as reported in the local press, have increased dramatically across France. The rise of the far-right Rassemblement National party has disinhibited xenophobic violence, even inside businesses. "In recent weeks, we've seen a resurgence of behavior that was no longer accepted," said Stéphanie Lecerf, president of A Compétence Egale ("Of Equal Skill"), a nonprofit organization fighting discrimination in the workplace. "In the banking and retail sectors, for example, employees are the object of verbal assaults such as 'I don't want you to serve me,' linked to their supposed origins or the color of their skin."
Employee unions draw a similar, equally worrying conclusion. "'Prepare to go home on July 8.' That's what we're hearing today from our CFDT members, from employees among themselves, violence is also on the rise, the tone is escalating," tweeted Lydie Nicol, CFDT national secretary in charge of discrimination issues, before the second round of parliamentary elections.
'Repeated micro-aggressions'
The latest available figures on the subject attest to this rise in xenophobic violence, even before the elections. The number of racist crimes and offenses recorded by law enforcement agencies jumped by 32% in one year in 2023, according to the Interior Ministry's statistics, included in the annual report of the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH). In her contribution to the report, the defender of rights pointed out that, in that year, almost half of the claims received for discrimination based on ethnicity took place in a professional environment: 23% in private employment and 19% in the civil service.
In the workplace, as in society in general, "everyday racism ranges from inappropriate remarks to insults, which isolate people by systematically referring to their origin," said Lecerf. "The range of aggressions is very broad: imitation of an accent, inappropriate humor, stigmatizing expressions. Micro-aggression in the workplace is not just a question of the seriousness of comments, but also of how they're repeated."
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