April 1986. Pap Ndiaye and Philippe Ducat, khâgne students from the prestigious Parisian high school Henri-IV, take the written tests at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). On the morning of the competition, the first handed the second the copy of Release of the day, a smile on the corner of the lips. The article is about the Internationalist Communist Party, a Trotskyist small group led by the very secretive Pierre Lambert. Several of its leaders have just resigned. Ducat jumps. It’s his party. He has been towing in Jussieu, in Henri-IV’s canteen, for a year. Pap Ndiaye, his best friend, often buys him the militant newspaper Worker information to please him. But he did not want to join the mysterious far-left organization, even though a rumor now claims otherwise.
“I have never been attracted by radical adventures. I voted PS”, confirms the Minister of National Education, who receives us in his office in the rue de Grenelle, this Thursday, May 11, after a meeting with the rectors on school co-education. A few months after this competition, the two young men will on the other hand be reunited, not only at the ENS, but at Socialist Convergences, a collective of ex-Lambertists now attached to the Socialist Party (PS). Its main animator has long called himself Kostas. The alias of Jean-Christophe Cambadélis.
“Pap is for me the name of an enigma”
We think we can identify Pap Ndiaye. Anti-racist convictions, university work on black Americans, companionship with socialists… A great committed researcher, greet his friends; a paragon of the “moral left”, say its detractors, when it is not worse. There is, however, an Ndiaye mystery. Until his 40th birthday, this great specialist in the history of minorities published nothing on this subject, or very little. Even more disturbing, he belonged to this so-called republican left, which prefers to speak of class than race. Not that he evaded the problem of racism, he was indignant about it, but without getting too involved in it. Without the question of his skin color either, he who joined the Representative Council of Black Associations when it was founded in 2005. “Pap is for me the name of an enigma… He did not give the impression to pay attention to his origins, he did not talk about it at the time”, launches Philippe Ducat, now professor of philosophy at the University of Pau. Jean-Christophe Cambadélis nevertheless noted “that his specific fight with us was that of real equality, beyond the principles”, an idea that he will develop from The Black Conditionin 2008.
Behind the commitments of youth pierces a spirit more complex than it is presented, follower of subtle syntheses. “I am flabbergasted by the caricature that is made of Pap. He is someone who adores French culture, a wine lover, fond of quotes from uncle gunslingers ! He was never into revenge”, testifies his friend the mathematician Bertrand Monthubert. Pap Ndiaye is thus able to juxtapose a “fascination” – he uses the word – for the struggles of black Americans and… an old passion for French army “I remained ‘fana mili’. I am the greatest world specialist, perhaps, in submarine films”, laughs Pap Ndiaye. Before a more serious admission: “If I had not done hypokhâgne, I would have done a Saint-Cyr preparation” To become a career soldier, general perhaps.” Out of a sense of patriotism. For me, it’s not defense or school. It’s defense and school”, he continues. In 1990, the student insists on doing his military service, not in cooperation, like most literary men, but in uniform. He will be a history teacher at Brest Naval School.Today, a miniature submarine sits on the fireplace in his office, a model from the Barracuda program, donated by Naval Group.
Not a “little thing”
Take a snapshot, Pap Ndiaye gets out of it. Mixed race, father a Senegalese engineer, mother a SVT professor from Loiret, one would expect him to have joined the elite in a mixture of embarrassment and envy, with a little distrust, perhaps, to regard to a not so open intelligentsia, as he will write from The Black Condition. No way. At Henri-IV, the baccalaureate from the Lakanal de Sceaux high school does not arrive as a student with a complex, even “humiliated”, in the words of Maurice Barrès. He is ready for ambition, but without a spirit of revenge. “I never felt like a ‘little thing’. I had confidence in myself,” recalls the minister. The only trace of an identity journey, this birth name, Dad, which the teachers pronounce on the first day during the roll call, and which the student asks to change. “It’s Pap,” he says.
Personal references mingle with readings requested in class. Proust, Gracq, Arendt, François Furet… The favorites of the Hauts-de-Seine native are classic, moderate authors, far from Malcolm X or Angela Davis who are already stirring up the debate. “I was deeply influenced by anti-totalitarianism. And I remained extremely suspicious of political expressions which seemed to me to fail in relation to the guarantee of democratic institutions”, recalls the history professor. Like the recent words of Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the bad Republic, do we suggest? “When I hear that, I immediately have a kind of alarm signal, it scares me,” he tells us.
“I could also have been a Rocardian”
At the ENS, he gets carried away for… Alain Finkielkraut, who publishes The Defeat of Thoughta plea for a demanding cultural policy aimed at the greatest number, in 1987. “I was delighted with Finkielkraut! It was a very precious source of intellectual training. The European Messenger, allowed me to discover many anti-totalitarian authors. I have always been grateful for him, even if he has become a reactionary, “reveals Pap Ndiaye. At the same time, he associates with those disappointed by Lambertism. “I met him at the start of the 1987 school year, at one of our meetings. Philippe Ducat told me: “I’m going to bring a really good guy”. He had made a presentation on literary news. We were surprised by his oratorical style, calm, precise, very different from ours”, recalls Philippe Campinchi, then leader of the Unef-ID, very linked to the cambadel networks.
Without ever getting involved in the apparatus, Pap Ndiaye ties in with this small band of former Trotskyists. He led several training sessions for young activists from Convergences Socialistes, “on the Revolutions of 1789, that of 1848”, he recalls. In the fall of 1986, he co-founded the socialist section of the ENS then became, in 1988, the president of the support committee for François Mitterrand at the Sorbonne. The same year, first conclusive lunch with Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, elected deputy. The future minister becomes, with Philippe Ducat and Eric Osmond, the parliamentary chief of staff, one of his three advisers on ideas. Coffee-debates on the terrace of L’Ecritoire, in the Latin Quarter, meetings at the parliamentary office… The trio supplies “Camba” with notes every week. Even if, basically, this companionship involves an element of chance, analyzes Pap Ndiaye: “I appreciated the intellectual work carried out by Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, but I could also have been a Rocardian. What made the difference was is my friendship with Philippe Ducat.”
Republicans versus Democrats
The normalien is particularly involved in The Manifesto against the National Front, a new association founded by the deputy in 1990. The approach of “Camba” opposes that of Julien Dray, vice-president of SOS Racisme, summed up by his slogan Do not touch My friend. “SOS, that seemed sympathetic to me but a little superficial. Their approach, moralizing, aimed to castigate the heirs of Nazism. Our perspective, more political, was to identify what was new in the National Front, to say that it was not a variation of fascism,” recalls Pap Ndiaye, who regularly writes for Le Manifeste.
It is difficult a priori to discern behind the Pap Ndiaye critic of SOS Racisme the whistleblower of The Black Condition. Eric Osmond however perceived the evolution of the sensitivity of his friend at the time of the debate opened by Régis Debray in The Obs, in November 1989, between “republicans” and “democrats” French: “We had discussed it, I had noticed that I was a republican, attached to the principles, and he rather a democrat, who wanted us to enter into the question discrimination by social experience. His approach was more pragmatic, more Anglo-Saxon”. Philippe Ducat also remembers that before the American presidential election of 1988, his comrade from the ENS had pasted a sticker on one of his notebooks… of Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate, finally defeated by George Bush.
Shock of single-sex meetings
During a stay at the University of Virginia in 1992, the future minister discovered the single-sex meetings of the black fraternity Black Student Alliance. His conceptions are shaken. “Discovering this reality was very strong for me,” he says, adding that he is “against” these meetings prohibited to whites. However, he does not opt for a thesis on minorities, but on DuPont de Nemours, the American company that has revolutionized the use of plastic. The subject has not yet caught him. When he was elected to Ehess in 1998, it was as a specialist in the history of science. Does the experience of racism participate in its evolution? Philippe Ducat says that in 1994, his friend complained of being checked by the police at the Gare du Nord. He goes there every day to go to the University of Paris-IV, where he teaches. “I must be the only Sciences Po professor to have been checked by the police”, slips Pap Ndiaye, who however refuses to describe himself as a victim of discrimination, except “small insults”.
There is in this intellectual in politics a characteristic that will always distance him from the decolonial theorists with whom we sometimes try to bring him closer: a systematic refusal of affect, to which he always prefers a distanced reasoning. “Pap is like that, very thoughtful, never impulsive,” notes Bertrand Monthubert. Hence the maturation needed to dare to address the issue of discrimination. The famous “click” occurred in 2005 when pharmacist Patrick Lozès, an activist for the black cause, asked him to get involved: “I said to myself, he’s right, it’s under my eyes, I have to do something. But something calm, rigorous.” Many would have published scathing forums, he prefers to devote himself to a history of the black minority in France. Its trajectory is launched. She brought him to the government. Could she have been different? The minister remains in suspense for five seconds before reacting: “It’s like cats falling back on their feet. Lives can always turn around differently, but in the end, we look alike.” A distanced, subtle, skilful response too. Like a signature.