Thursday evening, at Gillette Stadium in Boston, France faces Morocco. Everyone remembers the 2022 semi-final and the image, which has become emblematic, of Jamel Debbouze wearing a half-French, half-Moroccan outfit, heart divided between two flags. The image was funny, endearing, sincere.
But we forget what happened next: this two-tone jersey earned him a barrage of criticism from Moroccan artists and journalists, who accused him of having it both ways; a few weeks later, on the Jemaa El-Fna square in Marrakech, the darling of both banks was whistled by the public. The lesson is cruel but clear: anyone who refuses to choose ends up challenged by both camps. Where we saw wealth, Morocco saw evasion.
Conflicting allegiances
This is because binationality is an anomaly that our country persists in celebrating as a treasure when it is a contradiction. Let’s say it bluntly, at the risk of being offensive: you cannot be both French and Moroccan, French and Algerian. Not for lack of affection for one or the other shore of the Mediterranean, but because nationality is not a feeling. It is a legal and political link of allegiance to a sovereignty – that of the people, in France; that of the king, in Rabat. And allegiance, by definition, cannot be shared.
The lawyer knows what the supporter does not know: Franco-Moroccan or Franco-Algerian binationality is not an addition, it is a conflicting superposition. Moroccan law is based on the principle of perpetual allegiance: the Moroccan only ceases to be Moroccan by the grace of the sovereign, never by his will alone. The dual national who initially believes himself to be French remains, in the eyes of Rabat and Algiers, a national in his own right, subject to their laws, mobilized by their consulates, seized by their personal status.
The consequences are not theoretical. Every family law practitioner knows the impasses of the conflict of laws: marriages, divorces, inheritances, child custody subject to contradictory rules depending on which side you are on; French wives caught up in a personal status code that they did not choose; children detained in a country whose passport they carry against their will. The 1981 Franco-Moroccan convention on the status of persons, supposed to organize this coexistence, above all devoted its ambiguities. Binationality does not reconcile two rights: it delivers the individual to the most exorbitant of the two.
A double cultural belonging
Ernest Renan defined the nation as “an everyday plebiscite”. A plebiscite involves a choice. But what does the binational choose? Nothing, precisely: it accumulates. It votes here and there, elects deputies in Paris and representatives of the diaspora in Rabat or Algiers, comes under two sovereignties which may oppose each other tomorrow – diplomatically, commercially, militarily. What would his word as a citizen be worth? National service, taxes, the duty of defense, the basic loyalty owed to the State whose passport one carries: all of this presupposes a unique connection.
It will be objected to me that dual membership is cultural before being legal. That’s exactly my point: let’s leave it to culture! No need for a Moroccan passport to vibrate to the songs of Farid El Atrache, nor an Algerian identity card to cherish the Kabylia of your fathers. The inheritance is inalienable; it is not confused with allegiance. To confuse the two is to make nationality a family jewel, whereas it is a political contract.
Finally, we must say what binationality does to those it claims to honor. It assigns the children of immigration to a perpetual in-between, a dotted identity where one is never quite from here without ceasing to be suspected of there. It offers the States of origin a lever of influence on French citizens – activist consulates, supervised friendships, electoral slogans – and it symmetrically offers the French extreme right its permanent disloyalty trial. The dual national is hostage to two suspicions. Delivering him from it is not excluding him: it is bringing him, finally and entirely, into the community he has chosen.
Don’t leave this question to the far right
Should we not, therefore, consider an obligation of option: that upon majority, everyone chooses freely, solemnly, their nationality – and only one? Shouldn’t France renegotiate the bilateral conventions which perpetuate forced allegiance, and obtain from its partners that they finally recognize the renunciation? Wouldn’t choosing France then cease to be experienced as a denial, and become an act of full and complete adhesion, freed from the burden of suspicion?
It is finally time for the candidates in the next presidential election to seriously address this subject. For too long, binationality has remained a forbidden area of public debate: the left does not dare touch it for fear of betraying its electorates, the right of government barely touches it, and we thus abandon to the National Rally alone the monopoly on an issue which deserves better than slogans.
An act of full and complete membership
But to desert a subject is to hand it over to those who caricature it. Nationality, its conditions, its duties, its uniqueness: this is a republican debate par excellence, which should cross the entire political spectrum instead of marking its border. May 2027 be the opportunity to face it openly, with the seriousness it demands – and may we stop confusing the courage to ask a question with the extremism of those who claim to be the only ones to ask it.
Thursday evening, let us sing, let us whistle, let us cry on both sides of the stadium: the heart has its reasons and football its intoxication. But when the party is over, we will have to answer the question that Jamel Debbouze’s two-tone jersey unknowingly posed: we can love two countries; you can only be a citizen of one.
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