79

Considering teaching French “as a Foreign or Second Language” insufficiently specialized, the French Ministry of the Interior recently set up a new diploma, “French as a Language of Integration” and registered it as a trade mark. This event and the reactions it triggered incite us to investigate the history of the familiar notions of State, Nation, aliens, migrants and national language and the way they come into play when defining immigration policies and seeing how they evolve. True, one can only talk of immigration when a supposedly legitimate space has been defined in which an administrative and judicial body can implement the rules and regulations of those policies. It took centuries to build up the modern State and such characteristics only grew up gradually, at the same time as the notion of Nation developed and the national language, one of its defining criteria, was being standardized. These processes were contemporary to and interwoven with the Industrial Revolution, which entailed large population shifts. From the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, “psychologie des peuples” and eugenics were part of the more general racialism which, from within as well as from without, stigmatized groups supposed to be endangering the ethnic identity of the nation. After a period during which racism and discrimination were combated and appeared to regress, legal immigration is now being curbed by a whole battery of material as well as legal obstacles. Among these, several countries have included the prerequisite of language fluency, while talk about unequal races and civilizations can once again be heard.