Modelling the self, creating the other French denaturalisation law on the brink of World War II

In this chapter, I reflect on contemporary issues of securitisation by reading a historical case: the expansion of denaturalisation law in France on the brink of World War II. Based on French parliamentary archival documents related to denaturalisation’s legislative process, the chapter discusses the extent to which denaturalisation became a major political strategy, authorised in the name of the security of the nation. Especially attentive to the language at work in those political juridical documents, that is, paying particular attention to rhetorical tropes, semantic fields, and argumentative logics, the analysis raises questions about the power of security as a rhetorical and political device. More specifically, it demonstrates how security became a means to legitimise the relegation of democratic principles (Buzan et al. 1998:  23–8 ), showing the extent to which security-d riven arguments mobilise the notion of security beyond its operational ground – the intended effect of the arguments being not necessarily security as such, but rather the legitimation of denaturalisation practices. The effect is to turn nationality into a political tool – the denaturalisation of Charles de Gaulle, decreed on 8 December 1940 by the Vichy government, being the most striking illustration thereof. As politics of security impact on the political juridical concept of nationality, denaturalisation makes foreign those who are prosecuted in the name of the nation’s security, highlighting those moments when notions of selfhood and otherness are shaped, mobilised, and transformed.