At a family dinner, a casual antisemitic remark breaks the festive mood and precipitates a rupture. O. Bouquet offers us his variations on the topos of the “racist uncle”, taking the opportunity to question a part of family and national history.
My uncle Édouard is my mother’s older brother. He’s also my godfather. He often welcomed me into his home, with great generosity, during my studies in Paris. He’s my grandfather’s favorite son. He’s a renowned doctor and an esteemed head of department. Most of my cousins are Parisians. We’ve had the same parish for two centuries in the 17th arrondissement. We were in the Action française movement. We can’t get over 1981. We live in the memory of ancestors wounded at the battle of Rossbach (1757), of grand ambassadors and alliances with the Breguets and Schlumbergers. We quote the brother lieutenant of the 2nd armored division whose platoon raised the French flag on the cathedral spire during the liberation of Strasburg. We remember another, a member of the Resistance by chance, who was deported to Dora. A Croix de Guerre winner, my grandfather “joined de Gaulle in London”. But he was not as successful as his younger brothers, industrialists in the French West Africa. He felt downgraded. Especially when his first daughter, my mother, married a railroad worker’s son, “a laborer”. The mismatch led to estrangement. My parents left Paris. It was the ’70s. Direction: the South-West.
My parents started from scratch. The dining room stools were bought with a loan. The front door opened directly onto a barn. “Not bad central heating,” says my uncle Édouard, and everyone laughs. It’s a change from the big apartments on Boulevard Malesherbes. My primary school years were spent in a single class, among the sons of Franco-Portuguese workers and the “gypsies” who had their caravans next door. I didn’t go to Saint-Jean de Passy like my grandfather, nor to Stanislas like my uncles. But I was a good student. As a literary student, I was forced to do a terminale C (maths-physics major), as the level of the other classes was so low. Far from Paris, I’m connected to my family through history. This history is national and colonial. We have uncles who were Resistance fighters and others who were collaborators. One of them, who had his napkin ring at the Lutetia, fled at the Liberation – we call him “Robert the Traitor” – his uncle, my great-grandfather, slapped him: “When I think of your father dying at Verdun”. Another one was shot by the FTP, in front of his wife, children and the moat of his château. Castles that remain in the family are a favorite among the downtrodden. Lunch is served: “Monsieur le Comte is served”. Children keep quiet at the table.
What do you do with someone you love or have loved, who you fear might make racist or antisemitic remarks? I don’t take the risk any more, and I’ve cleared the air around me.
At 18, I’m sitting with the adults, I can take part in discussions. My uncle is into literature. I tell him I’m devouring Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen. His mouth pursed, his voice distorted, he took no notice: “Cohen, Cohen, Cohen…”. I look at my mother, not understanding. She says to me, with a look in which love for her son rivals obedience to the men in the family (which she sided with when she voted for Mitterrand in 1981…): “Cohen: he’s Jewish…”. In my university preparation class, I ventured to make an antisemitic joke. I was warned: “None of that here”. I began to understand. I read a lot about the extermination camps, went to Israel and became interested in the Middle East.
At Sciences Po, I fall in love. My girlfriend is Jewish. I ask my uncle if it’s a problem for him. He replies, “I prefer Claudia Schiffer”. One day, his son talks about Simone Weil. Someone asks: “The former minister?”. My uncle replies, “No, not the one who s…ed the capos”. There’s everything in that sentence. I’m flabbergasted. I catch my breath, bow politely and go home. I write a break-up letter to my uncle. I announce that I won’t be seeing him anymore. I tell a friend. He advises me not to do anything with it – it’s better to hope one day to be able to talk about it. I tear up the letter. But I’m not going to my uncle’s for dinner any more. No longer will I laugh with his wife who does my laundry. No longer will I rock dance with my cousins.
My friend Muriel becomes my partner. We have three children together. We decide that our family will be Jewish. I believe in god, she thinks she doesn’t. It’s a good thing: Judaism doesn’t require it. On the other hand, if I accept – with difficulty – that my children aren’t Catholic, I can’t resign myself to the fact that they won’t receive any religious education. I’ve read a lot about Judaism: it’s all based on the Covenant, and so it all starts with circumcision. Finally, I pose the problem, which is as simple as switching from saxophone to clarinet: it’s hard to become a Jew when you’ve been raised Catholic. The reverse often happens – they know it in my family: Jewish converts are the worst.
Our children are Jewish. We celebrate the holidays: brit milah and bar mitzvah for the boys; naming and bat mitzvah for my daughter. They come with me for Christmas and watch me make the sign of the cross at the entrance to the church. We’ve explained it to them. It’s always complicated in mixed families. If one of my children one day chooses to leave Judaism, that’s his or her right. I’ll support them.
So as not to simplify things, and to not be angry about pissing off my family like that (an “intellectual” is an “original”), I’ve redirected my taste for history far away from lost French and family grandeur. I don’t have the same name as my grandfather, but I’m still his eldest grandson. A hiatus to correct: at least, after Sciences Po, I’ll be able to work my way up to the position so long desired by his own grandfather: the Palazzo Farnese, Rome. Missed: the diplomat today is my spouse. She slept at Farnese a few months ago. And I’m working on the Turkish peoples. “At least they’re not Arabs”: my grandfather laughed out loud at one of his last jokes.
One day, a few years after his death, my uncle Édouard bumped into my wife at a funeral. His son said, “Do you remember Muriel? She’s expecting Olivier’s child. Muriel holds out her hand. My uncle doesn’t take it. That was the end of him. When he died of a terrible case of leukemia, I didn’t visit him; I didn’t take any news. His children don’t try to see me anymore. Fair enough.
What do you do with someone you love, or have loved, and fear they may make racist or antisemitic remarks? In these families, it often goes hand in hand and happens all the time. One person says “it’s Arab work”, while another says “in the bank, it’s full of Jews”. Everyone has their own answer and makes their own choices. I don’t take the risk any more, and I’ve cleared the air around me. Not easy: I loved my cousins. I’ll make one exception, and it’s a big one. In New York, another dear uncle invited Muriel and me to dinner 30 years ago. He told us he loved to walk around the city on Saturdays. Why, she asked? “Because there are no Jews in the streets”. You can’t make that up. Since then, I’ve told him what I thought, and Muriel has never seen him again. But I call him from time to time. After all, even antisemites have a Jewish friend.
I’m convinced that families like mine have cultivated, within the confines of their inner circle, something that has contributed, in France, say between 2002 and 2024, to the unabashed and dangerous emergence of racist and antisemitic discourse.
I’m an academic and I believe in the virtues of scientific demonstration. I can’t prove what I’m saying, and I haven’t consulted any sociologist or political scientist on the subject, but I’m convinced that families like mine have cultivated, within the confines of their inner circle, something that has contributed, in France, let’s say between 2002 and 2024, to the unabashed and dangerous emergence of racist and antisemitic discourse. While my children grew up worshiping the Republic and learning about Judaism, my aunts and uncles taught theirs that their Jewish cousins weren’t quite like them. Fortunately, we kept in touch with my parents. They think what they think. I don’t want to know, as long as they don’t express it in front of us. That would be a break-up I couldn’t contemplate. I invited them to my children’s bar mitzvahs. All went well. When the rabbi brought out the Torah scrolls, she asked Mum to come closer. In these families, we behave. Mom took the scrolls, concentrated. She loves her grandchildren, Jewish or not.
O. Bouquet
