At an October 14 friendly football match between France and Tunisia, some spectators at the Stade de France booed and whistled when the Marseillaise (the French national anthem) was sung. The jeering was loud and boorish, and French authorities were right to react. But it the wasn't the first time the Marseillaise was booed at a football match –it has happened before, at a friendly match pitting the French team against a former North African colony with which France has a complicated history– but the reaction from French officialdom was completely over-the-top. If such an incident were to occur again, the response prescribed by French officials would be to call off the match and evacuate the stadium.

Gabriele Marcotti wrote a column in The Times that sums up the incident and the French response, in all its majestic absurdity.

But what really caught my eye and my attention was a follow-up article in Le Monde. Jean-Claude Tchicaya is a middle-school civics teacher in Epinay-sur-Seine, near the Stade de France. According to Le Monde's account, nearly all his students are minorities, mostly of African or North African descent.

Tchicaya asked his class a simple question: if you feel French, raise your hand. Of the thirty students in the class, only four raised their hand.

Are the others immigrants, transients, or undocumented aliens? No, the article, Tchicaya, and the middle-schoolers all assume that all the students enjoy French citizenship.

The problem, underscored by the article, is that the young people don't seem to enjoy being French at all. Many seem to have family abroad, especially in North Africa, and express a romanticized proximity with their kin. When discussing why they don't feel French, others seem to voice fundamentally adolescent insecurities.

Tchicaya's take-away point is that "questions of identity are complex". I wish he'd asked his class some follow-up questions:
  • Can you renounce or surrender French citizenship? (I don't know the answer, but assume that there is a procedure to relinquish French citizenship.) 
  • If renunciation or surrender of French citizenship is  possible, how many members of the class are prepared to do so? Tchicaya and Le Monde's journalist seem to consider the students as dual nationals, with several passports in a drawer at home, not as prospectively stateless. Maybe Tchicaya could have prefaced this question with the assumption that legal residency in France would still be possible for those who'd give up French citizenship.
  • To what extent is citizenship like an affinity group, like support for a football team? Can you opt out of it? Why would you?