Heroic citizenship

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the issue of heroism as a sufficient condition for the acquisition of citizenship. I define heroism as exceptional, supererogatory, and risky acts of altruism and heroic citizenship as the reward for a heroic action carried out by a non-citizen resident of membership rights. I mobilize in particular the case of Mamoudou Gassama, ‘the Spiderman of Paris’, who was naturalized by the French President in 2018 after saving a child. While such positive outcomes for people in precarious legal and political situations are valuable, I provide a critical analysis of the ideological scaffolding and political meaning of heroic citizenship, i.e. how it is publicly justified and practiced. I argue that heroic citizenship constitutes a fiat of citizenship that reproduces a problematic picture of citizenship, relying on three ideological tropes: nationalism, sovereigntism, and moralism. Heroic citizenship represents the other side of a broader policy trend that has transformed citizenship into a privilege to earn.

KEYWORDS:

• Earned citizenship
• heroism
• moralization
• nationalism
• naturalization

Acknowledgments

The work was first supported by the Leibniz Research Group “Transformations of Citizenship” at the Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany) and further developed at the University of Rennes (France). I wish to thank Chris Bertram, Sophie Djigo, Martin Deleixhe, Speranta Dumitru, Christine Guionnet, Danièle Lochak, Juliette Monvoisin, Maël Petitjean, Alex Sager, Clara Sandelind and Ayelet Shachar for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There has even been a physics paper written to show the impossibility of the boy having fallen from the fifth floor and caught the balustrade on the fourth (Rousseau 2018). While I am personally unable to assess the scientific demonstration, the fact that the author brags twice in the (unpublished) paper that he was interviewed on a conservative radio show to explain his argument makes me doubt of the quality of the paper and the intentions behind it.

2. It is now partly available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B-T55e-6es

3. Official Journal, September 12, 2018, p. 72, available at. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/download/securePrint?token=Eifc$YOqBLLMGogghMyZ. Strangely, it misspells Gassama’s first name, calling him Mamadou instead of Mamoudou.

4. This title is a reference to what is inscribed on the front door of the Panthéon in Paris: ‘A grateful nation honors its great men’.

5. This does not exclude actions that also benefit oneself. For example, taking significant risks to save someone from a burning house is a heroic act, whether the rescuer was inside or outside the house in the first place. Whether a firefighter doing the same thing is also a hero raises the question of the criteria of supererogation. Firefighters have professional duties to save the child that the rescuer has not; they are not heroes per se. However, there is still ample room between the professionally acceptable (required even) risks taken by a firefighter and those ignored by a heroic firefighter. For a discussion of the specific social construction of firefighters as heroes, see (Hochbruck 2019)

6. On the meaning and practices of stereotyping in the context of race relations, see in particular Hall (1997).

7. See also Wong and Grace (2006) and Wong and Bonaguro (2020) who aptly called this ‘jus meritum’ or citizenship based on service, as a third principle next to jus soli and jus sanguinis. In the same vein, Shachar (2022) coins the concept of ‘jus contribuere’ for a fast track to citizenship for frontline workers.

8. Since soldier is a profession, my distinction could name two subsets of professional heroism, e.g. armed and non-armed. I follow the literature here, which mentions in particular the ‘professional ethos’ of nurses for instance (Oliner 2002) and ‘martial heroism’ (Franco, Blau, and Zimbardo 2011).

9. There are exceptions, like in Ireland or Israel, where citizenship for extraordinary service or status of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ may come with social and political rights, under conditions of residence.

10. ‘One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it’ (Wittgenstein 2009, 53/§114).

11. See also Kingston (2019, 169).

12. The expression fait du prince has a precise legal meaning in French administrative law. I refer here to its political meaning, which is, historically, the prerogative of the sovereign king to make decisions when the law does not explicitly prevent him. It now has a negative connotation, suggesting, more generally, an arbitrary decision made by a superior authority. It usually translates as ‘act of state’, ‘executive privilege’, or ‘government fiat’, but I keep the French expression to underline its monarchical undertone.

13. While, again, remaining within the confines of the law; I am not speaking of an authoritarian regime or a form of state of exception.