Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat is the author of several remarkable books. She has notably published
Les Nostalgériades
(Cerf, 2021).
It's only football, sure, but it's an instrument of
soft power
for a wealthy Islamic monarchy, whose population had nothing to do with this sport.
It's only football, but it's the national anthems that are proudly sung at the start, throughout the matches, then afterwards in the event of a victory.
It's only football, but it's a Napoleonic pleasure for the French to beat the "perfidious Albion".
It's only football, but after each victory, Moroccan players fly the Palestinian flag, while the Cherifian Kingdom has normalized its relations with Israel.
It's only football, but after their victories, the Moroccan players welcome their mothers and their children on the lawn, their wives, no.
Patriarchy that sanctifies mothers and relegates wives… It's only football, but he makes Leïla Slimani say in the JDD that
to belong deeply to the people
", whom she hardly frequents, especially from the beautiful districts of Paris.
It's only football, but the extreme leftist indigenist probes DNA, civil status and family trees, to say that France is nothing without foreigners.
The extreme right of the extreme right does the same, for another purpose.
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It's not just football.
It is the most effective enterprise of re-narcissizing peoples.
It is amusing that the great victories of Morocco are assimilated to those of the African continent, when we know the welcome that the Maghreb reserves for sub-Saharan migrants.
Morocco in the semi-finals is the Arab world in the semi-finals, and it is also Africa in the semi-finals.
It's not just football.
It is the revenge of the former colonies.
It's the Bandung Conference and more festive.
It's good war without war, except for Morocco or Algeria in fact, the defeats giving rise to looting, destruction, clashes with the police, as in Belgium or France in recent weeks.
Wins also oddly.
The support given to these foreign countries by our people, born and raised in France, of foreign parents, but also of parents themselves born here, hurts our national feeling, a feeling as legitimate as that which animates our sports opponents.
Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat
It's not just football, it's also a question of allegiance.
The support given to these foreign countries by our people, born and raised in France, of foreign parents, but also of parents themselves born here, hurts our national feeling, a feeling as legitimate as that which animates our sports opponents.
Because there is only the generation of children of immigrants.
There is the next, just as mired in these unique, opportunistic, schizophrenic attachments.
We understand that foreign nationals living in France can support their countries.
It is less understandable that children and grandchildren of immigrants, born in France to parents born in France, living in France, forcefully display flags, horns, thunderous declarations, a single allegiance, that which goes to the bled… For a long time,
the only way for the Algerians and Franco-Algerians to support France was for it to face Morocco.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
But resentment mixed with reactivation of religious community identity means that many Algerians will support their hated neighbor.
Because France is the ultimate enemy, a unifier.
We are reassured by hearing some Franco-Moroccans say that the victory of France would also be a bit of their victory, a consolation prize, that they would still have a team in play, which they would then support.
Opportunism of victory.
When the stakes are real, it is Morocco that most of them choose, or Algeria.
The choice of the heart.
And that's what hurts us.
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The same people who howl at racism, and call themselves more French than the French, are no longer so, they fracture the national community, corrupt a moment of collective jubilation, reduce France to a multi-service space of which they no longer become mere residents. .
They make themselves strangers to us.
There is no identity without identification, and no identification without belonging.
They do not identify with France in a moment as light as sport, how then would they belong to the national community?
Because their arguments are not only those of the heart or of sport, they speak of revenge, the same on social networks show a Lion (the team of Morocco is nicknamed the Lions of the Atlas) advancing towards France after conquering Portugal and Spain.
It is during these international sports meetings that it is still tolerated to wear the national colors, to sing our anthem without being taxed as far-right.
Fatiha Agag-Boudjahlat
However, Solomon's judgment is not replayed.
We are not to choose.
Dual nationality should result in dual allegiance.
Addition.
Two countries to love.
Equally.
Not a subtraction or a division.
Something that should be taught at school but that our Minister of National Education will never talk about between all the injunctions to talk about education in sexuality, gender, the environment, sport, health.
What if we learned to love France?
The same reproach applies to these deputies from the French, some of whom intervene in the Assembly only to defend the nationals and the interests of their other country.
Members of Parliament are the only ones who should not have dual nationality because making law they cannot have dual allegiance.
It's just football.
But it is during these international sporting events that it is still tolerated to wear the national colors, to sing our anthem without being accused of extreme right.
Because loving other countries is normal.
Loving France is suspect.
It is even the only moment when Macron forgets for a while the European Union, to which his allegiance goes, dispensing us with his usual criticisms against our flaws that he likes to list.
At each sporting encounter with a bled country, the party is ruined.
The possibility of a national and popular communion is reduced to ashes.
It's not the wars of independence that are replayed, it's only football.
A sport.
Who shouldn't leave this bitter taste… If France wins, the leftist far right will say it's
is thanks to its players of African origin, which it benefits from but who are African.
If it loses, the classic extreme right will say that it is because of these same players who are too little French.
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Those who love France the way everyone should love their country will support France and its players, whether they lose or win.
And who need to feel that their binational compatriots share this love that binds us to each other.
Faced with this disqualification of French patriotism which binds us to the land of our fathers would exclude the children of immigrants, the Republic offers compatriotism, which binds us to each other, between those who take the first step by choosing to belong and to claim to belong to the national community, that one becoming our brother or sister in Nation.