French Alpine Exclusion: Colonial Legacies and Urban Planning Render Mountains White Spaces, Grassroots Movements Reclaim Access
Original framing: “France: When racism peaks - and the mountains are claimed as white‑only spaces” — Middle East Eye
The Club Alpin Français (1874) was founded by colonial administrators who framed mountaineering as 'training for empire'; its first president, Henry Russell, wrote of Pyrenean peaks as 'virgin territories' awaiting French conquest. The 1936 Popular Front's 'congés payés' brought workers to mountains but excluded colonial subjects. The 1960s ski-station boom (La Plagne, Les Arcs) was financed by Marshall Plan funds and built on commons land, cementing class and racial segregation.
The whiteness of French mountains is not an accident of prejudice but a designed outcome of colonial administration (CAF's founding), urban planning (Haussmann's expulsion of poor to treeless banlieues), and tourism capital (1960s ski-station state capitalism).
The 'On Vient' movement's brilliance lies in naming the mountain as a site where republican universalism, laïcité, and environmentalism converge to produce racialized exclusion — and then walking through that convergence with hijabs, prayer mats, and ancestral songs. By restoring the erased genealogies of colonial alpine clubs, criminalized pastoralist knowledge, and the 1936 betrayal of colonial workers, we see that the solution is not 'diversity outreach' but land-back: transferring refuge governance to communal trusts, mandating racial equity audits in mountain law, and funding apprenticeships through ski-tax redistribution. The trickster Eshu at the col reveals the summit as a crossroads — the mountain will either become a commons of reciprocal care (ayni, satoyama, transhumance) or a fortress of melting snow and white privilege.