-Citizenship is one of the pillars of the definition of political community in France, and it has been deeply affected over the recent years by the thematic of immigration. Unlike our European neighbors, who tend to define citizenship in terms of nationality, in France, citizenship is rather dissociated from nationality, as we emphasize, regarding citizenship, the philosophical and revolutionary values of 1789, and indeed, French-style citizenship has been substantially defined by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Back then, knowing if someone was a national or a foreigner was not a primary concern, most people did not cross borders, and did not need passports. However, the question of citizenship was a central issue for the revolutionaries, and one could be a citizen without being a national. A number of known participants in the French Revolution such as Thomas Paine, an Englishman, or Anacharsis von Cloots, a German, who participated in the work of the Constituent Assembly, were raised to the dignity of citizenship, as was then said, because they shared the civic values of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution. During the Commune, a number of cases have been recorded of foreigners who were made citizens because of their involvement in the Paris Commune of 1870. However, during that period, there were also many cases of nationals who were not citizens, or who were so only to a limited extent, as specific categories were excluded from voting, and, during the 19th century, gradually, the content of citizenship became less a matter, as was the case during the French Revolution of participation than of voting, especially since the universal male suffrage of 1848. Were then excluded from full citizenship, if I may say so, on the one hand, women, who were given the right to vote only in 1946, minors from 18 to 21 years of age, as today and since 1974, minors have the right to vote from the age of 18 years, the mentally ill, people with criminal convictions accompanied by loss of civil rights, and also part of the population of the colonies. Let us not forget that equality of rights in the area, in Algeria, then a French department, was only obtained in 1947. There was a Second Committee for the muslim populations in this territory, and other nationals of the colonies did not have the possibility to become citizens, without even mentioning slavery, which ran until 1848. One could therefore be a national without being a citizen, or be a citizen without being a national, but the collusion, if I may say so, between citizenship and nationality nevertheless came with the Third Republic, as it was considered that the two were inseparable, and when voting rights for foreigners were further debated, constitutionalists in France considered it impossible, unthinkable, to dissociate citizenship from nationality. It has been done, however, as on the one hand, already by the mid-70s, a number of European coutries such as Greece, Sweden in 1975, the Netherlands in 1985, and Denmark in 1981, gave the right to vote and local eligibility to the citizens, thus dissociating citizenship from nationality for local life, and on the other hand, because the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which defines European citizenship in its article 8, precisely grants the right to vote and local eligibility to Europeans from the European Union who live in another country than the one of their nationality. This is a very important element of this new definition, and, as we see, it is immigration that brought about this transformation. Another transformation, the content of citizenship itself. Many civic demands from the 70s and 80s concern the fight against discriminations, to such an extent that the Forum of Migrants, in Brussels, proposed what became in 2000 a EU anti-discrimination directive, therefore legally binding in all EU countries. Those who preceded us in this domain are the British, who created the Commission for Racial Equality as early as 1976, and who were particularly interested in the implementation of the rights. It is not just a matter of stating the rights, as we do in France, but also of monitoring their implementation, and when it comes to discrimination, the difficulty lies precisely in the implementation of a number of principles that are enacted. Fight against discriminations, but also diversity. The notion of diversity was gradually introduced in the content of citizenship in European countries, on the one hand, by a certain number of demands and cultural events carried by immigration, and today we talk about a Europe of diversity. Europe even celebrated this notion of cultural diversity in a formal manner in 2008 by emphasizing both the cultural diversity of European countries and their internal diversity, by showing that immigration is also part of this notion and contributes to the definition of what Europeans are today. So, diversity today is associated with citizenship, it is hard to be defined as a public or private corporate citizen without emphasizing diversity in recruitment, in the people who are part of it, and so on, and therefore, today, it is an integral value of modern citizenship. The same goes regarding mobility, the fact that the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 focuses on the rights of the European citizen, and for the most part on freedom of movement, of work, and of establishment, and a few other rights, which are to refer to the European Ombudsman, or to the European Court of Justice, to be represented in a state other than one's own in case one's own state does not have an embassy. These are related to mobility, and mobility is part of the new values of this modern citizenship, and we are therefore far removed from the very autochthonous definition of the citizenship-nationality of the Third Republic, and today it is thanks to immigration, and very much so, that the legal and philosophical content of citizenship has transformed.
