3
SECULARISM
Racism was the subtext of the headscarf controversy, but secularism
was its explicit justiﬁcation. The law prohibiting “conspicuous”
signs of religious afﬁliation in public schools was deﬁned
above all as a defense of “laïcité,” “the cornerstone” of
French republicanism, the principle that clearly separated
church from state. Headscarves were deemed an intrusion of
religion into the sacred secular space of the schoolroom, the
crucible in which French citizens are formed. What was at
stake, supporters of the ban argued, was nothing less than the
future of the nation, the unity of the social body. “Etymologically,”
began the National Assembly report (Secularism and
Schools), “laïcité designates the laos, the people considered as an
indivisible whole.”1 Although the report conceded that the private
rights of individual conscience must be respected and that
the neutrality of the state must be maintained in relation to the
diversity of religious beliefs among its population, these could
not outweigh considerations of national unity. In any contest
between individual rights and state sovereignty, the interests of
the state must prevail.
Despite ﬁrm assertions of this kind, however, the headscarf
controversy opened a searing debate about the meanings of
French secularism, the limits of religious toleration, and the
Split DEMO : Purchase from www.A-PDF.com to remove the wate
founding principles of the republic. Proponents of a law to ban
headscarves insisted that it would only enforce long-established
boundaries between the public and the private, the political
and the religious. In fact, the debates showed these
boundaries to be anything but clear. It was the lack of clarity—
and a sense of desperate need for it—that deﬁned the situation
as a crisis.
Although the French case must be understood in terms of
its speciﬁc history, the issues at stake have larger signiﬁcance.
These days many of us ﬁnd ourselves confronted with challenges
to what we have taken to be long-established principles
of social and political organization. Secularism is one of those
principles. Roughly speaking, the word denotes the separation
of church and state, but beyond that there are historical differences
in its meaning and implementation. In America, home
to religious minorities who ﬂed persecution at the hands of
European rulers, the separation between church and state was
meant to protect religions from unwarranted government intervention;
the First Amendment to the Constitution begins
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This was designed
to prevent any single religion from dominating the affairs
of state, and it was soon extended to keep religiosity as
such out of government. In France, separation was intended to
secure the allegiance of individuals to the republic and so break
the political power of the Catholic church. There the state
claimed the undivided loyalty of citizens to the nation, and
that meant relegating to a private sphere the claims of religious
communities.This was expressed as state protection of individuals
from the claims of religion. In France, the state protects inSecularism
91
dividuals from religion; in America, religions are protected
from the state and the state from religion. But in both cases,
the terrain of politics is meant to be free of religious inﬂuence;
it is considered essential to republican democracy that religion
is a private affair. The distinction between private and public
(religious belief and one’s obligations to the state) is based in
traditions historically associated with Christianity.
Now, often in the name of democracy, members of religious
groups have begun to demand recognition of their particular
beliefs and interests and have deﬁned secularism as an obstacle
to the full enjoyment of their rights as citizens. Moreover,
some of them—Christian fundamentalists in the United
States, for example—go further, seeking to deny the secular
basis of the state altogether and insisting upon a “return” to the
“original” religious beliefs of the founding fathers. To this end,
they have produced a stream of revisionist scholarship designed
to prove that the American constitution is rooted not in
Enlightenment universalism but in Christian revelation.
Even as secularism has been assaulted from the right, it has
also been criticized from the left by those who see it both as a
way in which states have created acceptable forms of religion
(in this sense it is a “regulatory practice”) and as a mask for the
political domination of “others,” a form of ethnocentrism or
crypto-Christianity, the particular product of the history of the
European nation-state. Its claim to universalism (a false universalism
in the eyes of its critics) has justiﬁed the exclusion or
marginalization of those from non-European cultures (often
immigrants from former colonies) whose systems of belief do
not separate public and private in the same way, do not, in
other words, conform to those of the dominant group. Writes
92  
the political theorist William Connolly in a book provocatively
titled Why I Am Not a Secularist, “Democratic governance readily
degenerates into the organization of unity through the demoralization
of otherness.”2 And this (as we shall see in this
chapter) certainly captures something of what was going on in
the headscarf controversy.The law insisted on the unacceptable
difference (the “otherness”) of those whose personal/religious
identity was achieved by wearing the hijab, even though these
girls did not seek to impose their beliefs on their schoolmates
but simply insisted that they themselves could not dress in any
other way without a loss of their sense of identity.
From my American perspective, the French case is an argument
against secularism, proof of Connolly’s point that its effect
can be intolerance and discrimination. From the French
side, however, the growing political strength of evangelical
Christians in the United States is proof of exactly the opposite:
the urgent need for a strong secular state. If Christian moralism,
presented as revealed truth, is allowed to dictate standards
of behavior for everyone, if as a result the right-to-life trumps
the right-to-choose, they say, then democracy as we have
known it is lost. This is an argument I agree with. So it seems I
am caught in an impossible dilemma: for or against secularism?
Is the principle too easily corrupted, as the French case suggests?
Or does it necessarily protect us from religious absolutism?
Is it possible to separate an abstract ideal from its concrete
history and from the political uses to which it is put? Are
these questions themselves an indication of what one anthropologist
has called an “impasse of liberalism,” the exhaustion of
Enlightenment beliefs in the context of a new global world?
Or do they walk into what the philosopher Slavoj Zˇizˇek warns
Secularism 93
is a trap that forecloses politics by thinking of abstract universal
principles only in concrete terms?3
Part of my difﬁculty in sorting this out comes from the fact
that secularism is both the product of the particular histories
of Christian Western European nation-states and a principle
claimed to be universal. The invocation of the principle always
does speciﬁc historical work, so it’s hard to endorse it abstractly.
Yet it is precisely the abstraction that provides the
grounds for arguing speciﬁc cases: keeping creationism out of
the public school curriculum in the United States or banning
Islamic headscarves in French public schools. In order to distinguish
between these two instances, we have to look at concrete
outcomes: in the ﬁrst case, it’s what all children are
taught that’s at issue; in the second, it’s the right of a small
group of children to be taught what everyone else is learning
despite the personal religious identiﬁcation their clothing proclaims.
Of course, secularism ﬁgures in both cases: in the ﬁrst,
it rules out claims of religious truth in the public school curriculum;
in the second, it requires that there be no sign of student
religious afﬁliation in a public school. But there’s something
about the democratic result of the process that’s
important too: in the ﬁrst case, a minority is prevented from
dictating its religious belief to a majority; in the second, a minority
is denied access, on the grounds of its religious belief, to
what the majority enjoys. Perhaps it’s the democratic outcomes
I’m interested in more than the principle of secularism
itself.
But even if that is the case, secularism—as it is now often
invoked in Western European countries confronting Muslim
populations in their midst—carries connotations that must be
94  
addressed because they structure the way we think about how
to deal with religion in general and Islam in particular. Typically,
secularism is equated with modernity and religion with
tradition. Both as history and principle, secularism is taken to
be a sign of modernity, the opening to democracy, the triumph
of reason and science over superstition, sentiment, and unquestioned
belief. The state becomes modern, in this view, by suppressing
or privatizing religion because it is taken to represent
the irrationality of tradition, an obstacle to open debate and
discussion. Religion is associated with the past; the secular
state with the present and future. So in some areas outside of
the West, religion has been forcibly privatized (if not outlawed
altogether) and secularism embraced as a national route to
modernity.This was the case in Turkey in 1923, in Iran in 1936
under the rule of the shah, and in India at the moment of its
independence in 1947. For the Soviet Union and its satellite
states, secularism was ofﬁcially mandated, associated, like socialism,
with the progress of history.
Yet if we take a comparative international perspective, we
ﬁnd there are modern states that are not secular and religions
that are not traditional. There are secular states that are not
democratic—that forbid any dissent—and religions whose law
is the result of ongoing interpretative debate. Not only do religions
have a rationality and a logic of their own that belies the
“traditional” characterization of them, but they have evolved
over time; their theologians and jurists have reinterpreted
founding texts in relation to changing social, economic, and
political conditions. In a like manner, many states have secularized
by recognizing the religious beliefs of their citizens and
ﬁnding ways to accommodate them, sometimes by declaring
Secularism 95
religious holidays as state holidays (the Sunday Sabbath in
Christian countries is a prime example), sometimes by consulting
religious leaders about the impact on their followers of proposed
legislation, sometimes by including religious blocs in the
allocation of seats in a parliament. This treatment of religion
by secular states is the result not just of pragmatic adaptation
aimed at regulation (though it surely is that) but also of the interpretation
and reinterpretation of the principle of secularism
in particular and changing contexts.
Instead of positing religion as the antithesis of secularism
(particularly its democratic forms), it’s useful to see that they
also sometimes operate as parallel systems of interpretation.
This can certainly be said of some Protestant denominations as
well as of Judaism and Islam, where there is neither institutional
centralization nor a singular head of the church. Both democratic
states and these religions refer to founding texts (constitutions,
divine revelation, bodies of law), both delegate to experts
(lawyers, judges, theologians) authority to reconcile text
and interpretation, but both also open to more general, lay discussion
the meanings of the laws which set rules for behavior
and the expression of belief. I don’t want to push the analogy
too far, just far enough to offer an alternative to the characterization
of religion as an obstacle both to democracy and change.
I don’t deny that in secular states the relationship between the
political and the religious is asymmetrical, that democratic
states have coercive power that exceeds any inﬂuence religion
may have, but the importance of interpretation is still worth
noting. Thinking this way opens the relationship between the
state and its religions to negotiation without either forcibly repressing
religion or giving up on democracy—which remains a
96  
place where political resolution is never achieved on the ground
of religious truth. And it more accurately reﬂects the historical
processes by which the Christian nations of Western Europe
modernized. In those nations, the principle of secularism might
be described historically as one which protects the political
sphere from the determining inﬂuence of a dominant religion
while recognizing religion’s public (social, cultural) importance—it
is not only a private, individual matter.
According to this deﬁnition—which gives priority to history
and yet recognizes the power of argument from principle—France’s
drawing the line at Islam in the name of secularism
involved a distortion of that nation’s own history. Or
perhaps it is better to say that a particular idea of secularism—
conceived in sharp oppositional terms as the expulsion of religion
from the public sphere—became an ideological tool in an
anti-Muslim campaign. It was another way of putting Muslim
populations outside the bounds of “France” by deeming their
religion and their culture not only unacceptably different but
dangerous.
Laïcité
French supporters of the law banning headscarves deﬁned
themselves as apostles of secularism. This was not just any secularism
but a special French version, at once more universal
than any other and unique to French history and French national
character (“une singularité française”). This secularism
insisted on its truth (and on the danger that religion, a false
truth, posed to it). As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter,
laïcité refers not simply to separation of church and state but to
Secularism 97
the role of the state in protecting individuals from the claims of
religion. It further rests on the notion that the secular and the
sacred can be divided in the lives of individuals. Matters of individual
conscience are private and should be free from public
interference; the state’s job is to protect that privacy. Unlike
other secular democracies, wrote Bernard Stasi in the introduction
to his commission’s report, “France has raised laïcité to
the level of a founding value.”4 The language of Stasi and his
colleagues revealed the absolutist nature of their beliefs and
their fervent nationalism. The school was a “sacred” space; secularism
was “un méta-idéal humain”;5 the headscarf ban was
necessary to prevent a takeover of the school by “the street.”
The battle was cast as a veritable “crisis,” a war to the death between
polar opposites: in abstract terms, between the republic
and religion, modernity and tradition, reason and superstition;
in concrete terms, between contemporary France and Islam.
The image of a ﬁnal conﬂict between truth and error deliberately
invoked past efforts to wrest control of the hearts and
minds of citizens from the spiritual and institutional power of
the Catholic church, even though Muslims are a small minority
with nothing comparable to the social power which organized
Catholicism still wields. In fact, repeated references to
the purely secular nature of the nation so misrepresented the
history of its accommodations with the Catholic church that
opponents of the ban charged supporters with hypocrisy. The
issue, the critics maintained, was not religion in general but Islam,
and not just Islam but “immigrants.” In the end, they argued,
the defense of secularism was but another mask for
racism.
Historically, laïcité in schools dated to the Third Republic’s
98  
Ferry laws (1881–82, 1886), which made primary education
compulsory for boys and girls and which effectively banished
from the classroom religion as a subject and priests and nuns as
teachers. It is important to note that the laws did not expel
children who professed the Catholic faith, went to church on
Sunday, or wore crosses and other religious medallions to class.
“They had no obligation to conceal their religious afﬁliations.”6
The successful effort to wrest control from the Catholic
church—which was considered an enemy of the republic, allied
to monarchists who still nurtured dreams of another Bourbon
Restoration—deﬁned the school as the place where national
unity would be forged, where the children of peasants (who
spoke a variety of regional dialects and usually followed the instructions
of a priest) would become patriots.7 From the perspective
of minister of education Jules Ferry, the school was to
be the agent of assimilation; the goal of its pedagogy was to instill
a common republican political identity in children from a
diversity of backgrounds. The school was to effect a transition
from private to public, from the world of the locality and the
family to that of the nation. Teachers were the crucial element
in this process—secular missionaries, charged with converting
their pupils to the wonders of science and reason and the reasonableness
of republican principles. A shared language, culture,
and ideological formation—and so a nation one and indivisible—was
to be the outcome of the educational process.
Schools were the instruments for constructing the nation, not
embodiments of the nation itself. And they had enormous authority,
for they were the privileged site where differences were
contained and transformed into Frenchness.
Militantly secular in theory, French schools were more ﬂexiSecularism
99
ble in practice, in part because of their belief in the power of
reason to prevail in the educational process, in part because the
state recognized the historic signiﬁcance of Catholicism. The
public schools accommodated the desire of parents (and the
pressure of churches) for children to have religious education
and treated it as a right. Even after the separation of church
and state was mandated by law in 1905, students were not expected
to attend classes on Sunday, and they were given another
day off so they could receive religious instruction in their
churches. In this way, the importance of religion in their formation
was recognized, even as it was deﬁned as an extracurricular
activity, not part of the education they received at school.
(The secular state also maintains religious buildings as a public
responsibility; this is true not only of Christian churches, but of
the Paris Mosque, built in 1926 to commemorate the deaths of
Muslim soldiers in World War I.)
Although the constitutions of the Fourth and Fifth Republics
(1946, 1958) deﬁne France as an “indivisible, secular,
democratic, and social republic,” this has not prevented state
support of religious schools. Since 1958, the French government
has contributed 10 percent of the budgets of private religious
schools; more than 2 million children attend state-supported
Catholic schools. (One Muslim school was recently
established after eight years of difﬁcult negotiation.) In 1984,
when the government of President Mitterrand proposed integrating
these schools into a uniﬁed, secular system, massive
demonstrations were held in defense of “l’école libre,” and the
project was abandoned. The school calendar still observes only
Catholic (Christmas, Easter, etc.) and state holidays; the proposal
of the Stasi commission to add a Jewish and Muslim hol-
100  
iday was rejected by President Chirac. A former minister of
education agreed with this decision on the grounds that the
addition of Jewish and Muslim holidays would encourage religious
“communalism” in otherwise secular schools. For him the
Christian holidays don’t violate the principle of secularism—
proof to critics of “laïcité” that it is not universal at all but is,
rather, intimately bound up with the dominant Catholic religious
culture of the nation.
In some areas, historical circumstances have led to even more
dramatic compromises with religion, compromises the Stasi
commission was, in the name of “history,” loath to touch in
2003. The three departments of Alsace-Moselle, lost at the
conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and regained
after World War I, have never been required to conform to the
terms of the pact of 1905, nor were the colonies, where all sorts
of bargains were struck with local religious authorities. In Alsace-Moselle
religious instruction (for Catholics, Lutherans,
Calvinists, and Jews) is still a mandatory part of the public
school curriculum. With the permission of their parents, children
who do not want to take these classes may substitute
courses in morality. Rather than require the application of laïcité
to schools in these departments (and so a genuinely universal
policy), the Stasi commission recommended only that, in the
name of fairness, religious instruction be added for Muslims.
Even as it acknowledged the inconsistencies of its recommendations
(and justiﬁed them on the grounds of respect for
the wishes of the local population in Alsace-Moselle, the preponderant
inﬂuence of Christianity in French history, and the
historical variability of the concept of laïcité itself), even as it
insisted that secularism was in no way dogmatic, the Stasi
Secularism 101
commission presented laïcité as a principle that allowed for no
negotiation with religion8—at least, no negotiation with “extremist
groups,” who are “testing the resistance of the Republic
and pushing some young people to reject . . . its values.”9 Minimizing
the long struggle with militant Catholics in earlier
centuries and the tremendous controversies over the assimilability
of Jews, the Stasi report deemed Islam a special case. It
was not only historically outside the original “pacte laïque” of
1905 but also less willing to accommodate its dogmas to the
requirements of a pluralist society. Granting that there were
some more “rational” Muslims who understood the difference
between political and spiritual power, the report nonetheless
assumed that most followers of Islam would reject this distinction.10
Thus “extremist groups” became typical of Islam as a
whole and since their Islam, by deﬁnition, didn’t recognize the
values of liberty and laïcité, there was no need to tolerate Islam.11
The fantasy of a crusading Islam wedded to an unalterable
“truth” became the justiﬁcation for—and the mirror of—
an absolutist, intransigent secularism. The commission’s report
pitted France against its Muslims as homogeneous, warring
categories, and ruled out the possibility that girls in headscarves
might be rational agents who dressed according to
deeply held personal religious beliefs.
The odd thing about the Stasi report—indeed about the argument
of all those who favored the prohibition of headscarves
in schools—was that it took integration to be a prerequisite for
education, rather than its outcome. Proponents of the law insisted
that students had to come to school as individuals; what
communal identities they had must be left at home. In effect,
Jules Ferry’s vision of the school as the crucible of citizenship,
102  
the space of transition from private to public, from family and
community to nation, was replaced; the school now became a
miniature version of the nation, conceived as a collection of abstract
individuals who were shorn of any identity other than
their French citizenship. As in the representative bodies of the
nation, so in the schools, universalism meant conformity to the
same rules, and membership in only one “cult,” the republic.
Those who did not conform in advance, who were not already
“French,” fell outside the purview of the universal because, as
in the body of the nation, commonality was a prerequisite for
membership in the educational community. In the impeccable
logic of former minister of education Bayrou: “The school is
designed to integrate; therefore it must exclude.”12 This was
another way of saying that Muslims could never be French.
Those who believed that Muslims should be considered
members of the nation had a different notion of laïcité and its
history. For them the school must necessarily reﬂect the actual
diversity of society; its job was to negotiate differences and to
create some commonality through the shared experience of education.
It was the mythologized secularism of proponents of
the law, they suggested, that created a crisis, not the fact that a
few girls wore headscarves to school. These opponents of the
ban insisted that integration was a gradual process with its own
“temporal logic.” “To ask young Muslim women to take off
their veils before coming to class is a bit like asking them to
pass ﬁnal exams at the beginning of the course.”13 In an ideal
classroom, there would be respect for diversity, achieved through
a notion of neutrality, as well as the possibility for children to
become autonomous subjects. If autonomy meant rejecting the
pressures of religion and family, so much the better, but it
Secularism 103
might also just mean simply understanding the choices others
have urged you to make.
Underlying many of the statements opposing the law were
the same commitments that seemed to drive the law’s proponents:
to education as a modernizing process and to secularism
as a way of containing the power of religious truth claims.
There were, though, important differences. For one, critics of
the law argued that assimilation was the wrong model for national
unity; there could be toleration and coexistence of differences
without homogenization. Indeed, if secularism were
understood as a platform for the negotiation of difference instead
of as its erasure, national unity based on shared values
might still be the result. The question was how to have a “dynamic
process of integration” that was not “a policy of pure and
simple assimilation.”14 What better place than a public school
to stage the “encounter of cultures and values” that might produce
a new universalism?15 In this vision, the school was the
training ground for secularism, a preparation for participation
in adult politics, a place in which the merits of ideas would be
weighed without regard for their provenance. In addition, although
there was no question that the state would continue to
set limits and standards for religious expression (as it did for
education), Christianity would not be the sole model for determining
the acceptability of other religions. According to this
form of secularism, children who refused to take history
courses which contradicted their religious views would be ruled
out of order, while those wearing headscarves (or other indicators
of religious commitment) would not. The critical point
was that the privatization of belief was not required as proof of
104  
eligibility for school attendance, or, for that matter, of eligibility
for membership in the national community.
The debate about the meaning of secularism between supporters
and opponents of the headscarf ban was uneven, to put
it mildly. Although the outpouring of opposition to the law
consumed many pages of newspapers, journals and books, its
public impact was muted by the stridency of the law’s supporters,
who represented a considerable majority and who argued
in stark either/or terms. There was little room for the kind of
nuance—philosophical or historical—offered by opponents of
the law. As debate escalated and the foulard became synonymous
with the voile, you were either pro- or anti-veil. Those
who insisted that Muslim girls should continue to be admitted
to public school were quickly labeled “pro-veil” (and in some
instances, dangerous Islamists), even when they took pains to
insist on their commitment to laïcité and to distance themselves
from religious apologists. So, for example, an appeal by a
group of intellectuals and activists originally entitled “Yes to
Laïcité, No to Laws of Exclusion” appeared in the newspaper
Libération on May 20, 2003, with a new title not approved by
the authors: “Yes to the Headscarf in Secular Schools.”16 (The
change reﬂected the pro-exclusion stance taken by the editors
of this left-leaning newspaper.) Many of these same intellectuals
chose to resign from the board of the feminist journal ProChoix
when they were denounced by its editors as supporters of
“fundamentalism.” They were also depicted as “partisans of the
veil.”17 The Stasi commission report, like the one produced by
the National Assembly study group, was largely devoted to the
testimony of experts about the meaning of the veil and about
Secularism 105
the ways in which Islam and radical Islamists were responsible
for all sorts of disruptions in the schools. Despite many nuanced
testimonies—about the multiple meanings of the headscarf,
about social and economic discrimination against North
Africans, and about the crises of ﬁnance and authority in the
schools themselves—the conclusion of these ofﬁcial bodies was
that banning the veil was the only way to contain the crisis that
Islam had unleashed and the best way to enforce the secular
aims of the republic. The falsehoods of Islam must not be allowed
to dilute the hard truth of French laïcité. In this way, one
absolutism was offered to counter another, and the door was
shut to the kind of political conversation that was needed if the
urgent social problems of the Arab/Muslim “immigrant” population
were to be addressed. Indeed, I would argue that in this
case, the dominant conception of laïcité was as unbending as
the Islam it purported to combat.
The School
The law forbidding headscarves in primary and secondary
public schools was a symbolic gesture in the war of the republic
against its enemy. It was not as if all headscarves were banned
from all public places. Private schools, which receive subventions
from the state, were not governed by the ban. Women in
the street were allowed to dress as they chose, as were university
students, who were considered free agents. And, as many
critics pointed out, women with headscarves were allowed to
go on cleaning schools and government ofﬁces without being
considered a danger to the foundations of the secular state. Although
the law was worded so as to have universal application
106  
(it banned all conspicuous religious signs), nobody until now
had worried about Jewish boys wearing skullcaps or Sikhs
wearing turbans. The law was applied to them as a kind of afterthought
and without provoking any debate. Why was school
attire so important? And why direct a law primarily at underage
Muslim girls?
The answer to these questions, as I have already indicated, is
that since the Third Republic, schools have been considered the
key to disseminating and stabilizing republicanism, to creating
France as a nation one and indivisible. Under the Ferry laws,
children were the target population for cultivating and reproducing
republican values, and girls were particularly important
to reach if the power of priests over women (a power thought
to be so strong that it justiﬁed denying women the vote until
1945) was to be broken. The old concern about women and religion
(and the state’s particular responsibility for the weaker
sex) was transposed in 2003 onto Islam but with a twist: Muslim
girls stood in for all vulnerable children, and the supposed
pressure from their fathers, brothers, and imams to wear headscarves
recalled the once formidable power of Catholic priests.
At the same time, girls in headscarves embodied the very peril
from which vulnerable children needed to be protected: they
carried the virus, as it were, of religion into the school. To further
complicate things, they were perceived as making a statement
about sexuality that was also considered out of place (see
chapter 5).
The Stasi commission took its recommendations to be an
afﬁrmation of the Ferry laws, but it did not acknowledge the
vast changes that had taken place in schools since the golden
age of the Third and Fourth Republics. Schools no longer enSecularism
107
joyed the same prestige or performed the same functions.
Moreover, society had changed as well; there was a deeper
racial divide than ever before, exacerbated by the seeming unwillingness
of political leaders to do anything about it. Schools
were the microcosm of a society under siege, not because of a
challenge to secularism by religious students and their parents,
but because of many economic and social factors, including
what the sociologist of education François Dubet calls a
process of “massiﬁcation.”18 This involved the entry, from the
1970s on, of vast numbers of lower-class students into secondary
schools (the four year collèges and then the lycées, equivalent
to our middle and high schools), accompanied by changes in
the schools’ mission, the role of teachers, and the relation between
schools and society. In his account—which I will rely on
in what follows—it is class (compounded in some instances by
race) and not religion, that is the heart of the matter. The
headscarf law was, from this perspective, a displacement of
concern, a way to avoid facing the social and economic dilemmas
that roiled French schools.
Although the Ferry laws of the 1880s made primary education
secular and compulsory, in fact just a small portion of
the population ever ﬁnished the course. Only about half of eligible
students earned primary school certiﬁcates; even fewer
went on to complete secondary school. This means, Dubet
says, that in the last years of the nineteenth century and well
into the twentieth, the assimilation of many migrants, as of
most workers, was effected in the workplace, not in the school.
Those who did attend school were treated only as students,
that is, as potentially reasonable individuals whose training
took neither their social origins nor their emotional well-being
108  
into account. (American friends of mine, on sabbatical for a
year in Paris in the early 1960s, encountered this ethos when
they asked to meet with their daughter’s teacher because they
were concerned about how she was adjusting to her new environment.
The teacher’s brief reply startled them: “she is very
well-behaved and her notebook is neat.” So much for the psychologizing
they were used to at parent-teacher conferences
back home!) The teacher was there simply to promote learning,
not to provide any other social services, and whatever there
was of a youth culture at that time was to be left at the door of
the school. For this reason the school was, in principle, a welcome
place for children of minorities, such as Jews and Protestants.
Teasing, racial epithets, and other forms of intolerance
were not acceptable in this formal learning environment, although
they undoubtedly occurred outside the doors of the
classroom. Children wore regulation clothing or uniforms, and
the sexes were taught separately; opposition to coeducation,
Dubet explains, came from a desire to exclude social activities
and emotions; “the largest part of moral education was left to
families.”19 The mixed-sex schools that defenders of the headscarf
ban now tout as the hallmark of laïcité—one of the signs
of the republic’s eternal commitment to gender equality—did
not come into existence until the 1960s, and then only because
shortages of funds for new construction mandated the end of
separate buildings for boys and girls.
Changes began in the 1960s, but it was not until the 1970s
that everyone expected to attend collège (our middle school)
and even lycée (our high school). Dubet estimates that about
half of any age cohort under twenty now attends school, many
of them already earning wages even though they are still stuSecularism
109
dents. One measure of the expansion is overcrowding in
classes. The proportion of overcrowded lycée classes, for example,
rose from 9.4 percent in 1983 to 32.9 percent in 1990.20 As
school populations expanded, national education as a proportion
of the state budget fell. In this context, social divisions between
schools became more pronounced. For middle- and upper-class
parents who knew how to work the system, placing
one’s child in a good school became a primary concern. Working-class
parents had less social capital and less clout, so their
children often ended up in poorer-quality schools, while children
of families in the “immigrant” suburbs were conﬁned to
whatever was available in their neighborhoods. Needless to say,
in these schools especially, social problems could not be left at
the door. Paradoxically, as schools became an increasingly important
avenue of upward mobility, attendance at some of
them (those in ZEPs, a designation for trouble spots in the
system that needed special attention and special funding) did
not fulﬁll their promise, and this only increased the resentment
of students for whom school attendance was a prerequisite for
a job. During the riots in the fall of 2005, many students from
the banlieues complained that their school attendance had not
only been useless but harmful, because through it they were
identiﬁed as coming from inferior places and so assumed to be
ill-prepared for any job. Schools were not a means of integration
but a way of reproducing, indeed guaranteeing, existing
social hierarchies.
The massiﬁcation of schooling was accompanied, Dubet
tells us, by a new culture which brought the world of adolescence
into the classroom. “Republican laïcité rested on a distance
between school and society, but then the school gradually
110  
allowed itself to be swept up in a mass youth culture which it
barely resisted.”21 In the aftermath of 1968, to the delight of
many ardent secularists on the left, formal dress requirements
were abandoned and there was new emphasis on the development
of the whole child. The school became a place where individuality
was encouraged (even as republican values were being
taught), and students were granted the right to express
themselves, to deﬁne their identities through distinctive clothing
and hairstyles. “[F]or adolescents the ‘look’ is not simply an
outer covering, but a true image of oneself, a face in the strong
sense of the word.”22 In this context, where jeans and rasta
hairdos were acceptable, many students (who themselves did
not wear them) saw headscarves as another form of self-expression.
So did some members of the clergy. “Don’t confuse
the problem of Islam with that of adolescence,” Cardinal
Lustiger warned proponents of the law.23 But that was exactly
what the law did, ignoring or denying the fact that the laïcité
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had long vanished,
making the banning of headscarves an exception to the
tolerant indulgence otherwise granted student expressions of
identity. Several elder statesmen—ﬁrst-rate social scientists,
themselves the products of the schools of the ﬁrst half of the
twentieth century—insisted to me in conversation that the
headscarf ban would somehow protect or restore the laïcité
they had known and loved, as if no history had intervened between
the 1930s and the present! Why would these supporters
of the law, otherwise intelligent analysts of French institutions,
somehow blame Muslims for the loss of the schools their
memories cherished, a loss that had little or nothing to do with
Islam? Their irrational insistence on the urgent need for a ban
Secularism 111
points up how overdetermined the headscarf was as a symbol
of social and political disturbance.
Another moment of disciplinary action against an article of
clothing complicated the headscarf debate, in both amusing
and revealing ways. This was the “affaire du string.” In October
2003, teachers and principals at some schools began sending
home girls who were thought to be inadequately dressed because
they were wearing “le string” (a thong), visible at the
waistline of their low-cut pants and cropped tee shirts. This
kind of outﬁt exceeded the bounds of acceptable self-expression,
the teachers argued, turning classroom attention to matters
erotic instead of intellectual. Some commentators linked
the string and the veil as opposite sides of the same coin. In
one case, the body was overexposed; in the other, it was too
hidden. Girls wore the string to make themselves sexually attractive
to boys; they wore the veil to refuse that possibility. For
some feminists, the same subordination of women was at work
in both cases; for others, there was a vast difference between
the overt acknowledgment of desire and its suppression. When
a government ofﬁcial proposed a return to uniforms as a way of
getting rid of all these differences, his suggestion was opposed,
on the one hand, by those who damned it as archaic and, on
the other, by those who championed the right of young girls to
follow the fashion of the day. Government intervention, from
either point of view, was unacceptable. Needless to say, while
the string was considered a fashion statement and little else
(there was, of course, critical discussion of the pressures girls
felt to follow fashion), the veil was taken to be far more dangerous,
requiring a law to protect the republic from its inﬂuences.
Many of those who bemoaned the self-exploitation girls
112  
were willing to undergo in pursuit of attention from boys were
nevertheless unwilling to propose legal action to stop it; they
acknowledged that the world of adolescence presented challenges
of this kind and that it was the business of the school to
work with that world and not to oppose it. These same people,
however, thought that legal action to ban headscarves was necessary;
that article of clothing was not about adolescent selfexpression,
or if it was, the form of self it was expressing was
not an acceptable one.
The new emphasis on student self-expression, on the
school’s need to attend to the development of whole individuals,
inevitably brought a change in teachers’ roles: they were to
be counselors, not just instructors. In theory, they were to be
more sympathetic to the emotional demands of adolescence,
closer to the lives and developmental issues of their students
than their nineteenth-century counterparts had been. This
may have worked well in primary schools and in collèges and
lycées where students and teachers came from similar social
milieux, but in poorer districts—the ZEPs—there was greater
distance between teachers and students. (These schools make
up about 10 percent of the total number nationally.) In these
schools, students were faced with teachers who often did not
understand or empathize with their situation, while the teachers
confronted discipline problems that their predecessors or
colleagues who taught in more elite districts had rarely seen.
Facing challenges to their authority from angry, disaffected
students and their parents, they not only felt a loss of control
but found their professional identities destabilized. They no
longer had the authority and the standing in the community
that had once accrued to French schoolteachers. Add to this
Secularism 113
cuts in government funding for education, depressed salaries,
and decreased spending for social services and community centers
in the banlieues, and the difﬁculties for teachers were com-
pounded.
It wasn’t just discipline that was at issue, although that
surely was a problem. The philosopher Etienne Balibar points
out that the very status of knowledge has changed, the belief,
once unquestioned, in the power of learning to shape people’s
minds and so their lives. It wasn’t only that the instrumental
notion of education, as the sure route to a good job, was belied
by high rates of unemployment among “immigrant” youth, it
was also—less tangibly, but no less certainly—that the concept
of knowledge as a good thing in itself no longer carried the
same weight in the culture as a whole. The power that came
with knowledge once animated the desire for it and therefore
excited both teachers and students. When that power was diminished,
the reverence teachers could once anticipate simply
because they knew so much declined; they were increasingly
considered just another kind of state functionary, disciplinarians
in the sense of rule enforcers instead of mind trainers.
Balibar argues that most teachers, even those not working in
ZEPs, identiﬁed with the loss of status and authority so evident
among their colleagues in those areas. For this reason,
even though most of their members did not face the difﬁculties
of those in the ZEPs, the major unions of secondary school
teachers in France supported the ban on headscarves, and they
were a powerful political constituency. They did this, Balibar
suggests, because “they saw no other remedy for their impotence
except the symbolic afﬁrmation [of their authority] by
the power of the state for which they worked. . . . Laïcité,
114  
whatever its deﬁnition, was not the end but the instrument of
this corporate reﬂex.”24 Banning the headscarf seemed a strong
gesture afﬁrming the importance both of the school and the
state, as well as of the intertwined relationship between them.
Here once again we see how overdetermined was the symbolism
of the veil. The fate of teachers was equated with that of
the nation, and the line drawn at the headscarf was meant to
secure them both. Instead of exploring the role the school
could play in the new conditions of the twenty-ﬁrst century,
instead of asking on what (new or different) grounds the authority
of teachers might be restored, the decision to ban headscarves
placed the blame outside the system itself. The crisis in
the schools—and indeed, there was one—was attributed to
foreign inﬂuences, to “immigrants” whose values clashed with
those of the republic. The solution was to eliminate the foreign
inﬂuences and then everything would be all right—a delusional
“ﬁx” given the much larger set of social problems that
needed to be addressed.
The Nation
When President Jacques Chirac created the Stasi commission
in July 2003, he did so in the name of national unity. “France is
a secular [laïque] republic,” he wrote in his charge to Bernard
Stasi. Since the law of 1905 separating church and state, laïcité
has established “deep roots in our institutions.” Indeed, that law
had become a key aspect of “national cohesion,” a way of guaranteeing
that social differences would not fracture the unity of
the nation. But the way of achieving unity involved denying the
existence of the differences altogether. “The Republic is comSecularism
115
posed of citizens,” Chirac went on, “it must not be segmented
into groups.” The “risk of a drift into communalism” must be
avoided. Nothing less than the future of the nation was at stake.
Already in 1989, the future of the nation was linked by many
commentators to what happened in the schools. Wrote one,
“The secular public school, the only appropriate expression of
the secular and republican community which is our nation, is in
danger. Today a headscarf, and tomorrow?”25 The National Assembly
committee’s call in 2003 for a law banning headscarves
in public schools was an answer to that question. “More than
ever, the authorities must be vigilant about [enforcing] strict respect
for the principle of laïcité.”26
It is hard to imagine that a few schoolgirls wearing headscarves
could bring down the nation or even produce fractures
in its foundation. But that was how the argument went. Not
only the president of the republic and most members of the
Stasi commission, but many politicians, journalists, and public
commentators, too, waxed apocalyptic on the issue of the
headscarf and the future of France. It was as if the headscarf
were the ﬂag of an alien nation whose forces were intent on
compromising national integrity. These forces sought, it was
imagined, to corrupt the minds of the young and vulnerable
(represented most poignantly by schoolgirls), thereby eroding
laïcité, one of the pillars of the republic.
The headscarf law was informed by a particularly defensive
nationalism, one which rested on belief in the unchanging, indeed
unchangeable, truth of a certain national identity. To
challenge that truth was to challenge the very idea of French
sovereignty and of the sovereign people whose will was said to
be incarnated in the national representation. Elsewhere I have
116  
written on the way in which this vision of the nation rests on
abstraction, on the idea of an abstract individual shorn of his
social, religious, and ethnic identities.27 Articulated at the time
of the French Revolution as an alternative to the corporatist
theories of the Old Regime, abstract individualism was the basis
for citizenship and for the distinctively French concept of
universalism.This universalism rested on an opposition between
the political and the social, the abstract and the concrete. In the
realm of the political, everyone was an individual—except for
those whose lack of autonomy (initially women, slaves, and
wage earners) made them unable to represent themselves. The
claims of any group membership (this came under the rubric of
“the social”) must be shed if one were to be considered an individual.
It was for this reason that, at the time of the revolution,
Jews were initially excluded from citizenship. When they were
enfranchised, it was as individuals, not as members of “a nation.”
There were some, however, who could never be dissociated
from the group to which they belonged, who could therefore
never become individuals. This was the case for women,
whose sex was thought to make them incapable of abstraction
(unlike men, they could not be detached from their bodies). As
a concrete result, they did not receive the right to vote until
1945. For different reasons, Muslims are now in a similar position.
Of course, they do qualify for formal citizenship, but their
membership in a religious community that does not conceive
of individuals as able to categorize their beliefs in terms of
public or private makes them not susceptible to abstraction,
hence incapable of assimilation.
Since the 1980s and especially since the celebrations of the
bicentennial of the revolution in 1989, there has been increasSecularism
117
ing emphasis on the idea of the unity and indivisibility of the
nation. This emphasis has acquired mythological status, obscuring
the long and complicated history of various group
struggles for rights in France, the most obvious being the successful
campaigns of workers for recognition of the reality of
class divisions in the social body. And though abstraction is the
principle of universalism, in practice it is sameness, achieved
through cultural assimilation, that guarantees national unity.
Individuals must not only be autonomous, they must also share
what are thought to be eternal French values in order to be
taken seriously. For this reason, current demands for social and
legal recognition by various groups—women, homosexuals,
and “immigrants”—have been met with denunciation: they are
communalist, they give priority to group membership, they introduce
“unnatural” differences that will rend the social fabric
and weaken the body of the nation.
The excuse (in the name of unity) of protecting the nation
from the demands of some of its citizens has been used to block
action on behalf of groups underserved by the generous (for
some) provisions of the French welfare state. American afﬁrmative
action is anathema in France, not for the same reasons that
right-wingers here have objected to it (because it applies tests
other than individual merit to those whose paths have long
been blocked by discrimination), but because it is contrary to
French universalism and to the national unity that it necessarily
creates. From this perspective, discrimination does not exist, because
differences of groups are not recognized; if differences
don’t exist, how can there be discrimination?
The unacceptable demands of domestic groups have been
attributed to external pressures—from the European Union
118  
and other international institutions like the United Nations—
that in themselves undermine national sovereignty by substituting
rules from elsewhere for those that are French. The historian
Timothy Smith argues that blaming outside pressures is
a way for French elites to refuse to address the internal problems
that need attention: high unemployment rates; grossly
unequal employment and pay rates for youth, women, and “immigrants”
as compared to previous generations; a health care
and pension system that protects older, entrenched, public-sector
employees at the expense of the young and the poor. These
are not, he says, the result of “globalization”—often cited as an
inescapable, uncontrollable force undermining national sovereignty—but
of domestic political decision-making that opts to
protect the established classes (some 60 percent of the population)
at the expense of its marginalized others. These days, he
argues, French politicians displace blame elsewhere rather than
taking responsibility themselves.
Although I think he underestimates the impact of Europeanization
and globalization, I ﬁnd Smith’s analysis helpful for
explaining the way in which the law against headscarves was
depicted as a defense of the republic. The discussion of headscarves,
couched in extreme nationalist rhetoric, shifted the
conversation away from the problems posed by a large, impoverished
population—many of whom have lived for decades as
citizens in France, many of whom are non-practicing Muslims
or more culturally than religiously identiﬁed as such, and are
certainly not political radicals—to an imaginary threat posed by
Islam. This is not to deny that there are terrorists on French
soil; it is to say, however, that there is a far more momentous
question facing French decision-makers: how to achieve the inSecularism
119
tegration of former colonial subjects as “fully French” into a society
of which they have already long been a part.
It is hard not to agree with the anthropologist Emmanuel
Terray when he argues that the headscarf controversy was a
form of “political hysteria” in which real social anxieties were
displaced onto phantasmatic enemies and phantasmatic solutions
were offered in place of concrete social policy.28 The
problem of the status of immigrants and of the racist practices
that kept them on the margins of French society was redeﬁned
as a problem of Islamism, an external threat with links to Iran
and Saudi Arabia. The solution was an endorsement of militant
secularism as a counterweight—a secularism conceived as
the truth of French national identity rather than as the ground
on which such identity could be negotiated. That went along
with a defensive insistence on preserving the homogeneity of
the nation in the face of evidence that France’s populace was
socially divided. In deﬁance of this evidence, social divisions
were blamed on the stubborn refusal of Muslims to integrate,
on the inherent “foreignness” of their “culture.” It followed that
the cure for discrimination was the denial that differences existed
at all; if they did, it was the fault of “communalism”—a
concept alien to France.
There was, of course, a crisis, but not the one proponents of
the law diagnosed. Instead, the elevation of laïcité as the unquestioned
and immutable truth of French republicanism was
the symptom of a set of difﬁcult problems: how to improve the
lot of an impoverished, marginalized “immigrant” population,
and, more generally, how to recognize difference in social and
political terms. Instead of confronting these problems headon,
the leaders of politics and opinion (with a few exceptions)
120  
resorted to a kind of knee-jerk racism that demonstrated the
paucity of their philosophical resources and the weakness of
their political capacities.
Conclusion
It would be a mistake to conclude, as some of the proponents
of the headscarf ban argued, that the version of secularism they
endorsed was the only version possible. Harking back to 1789,
they insisted, against good historical evidence to the contrary,
that the integrity of the republic rested on a ﬁrm refusal of religion
in the schools and in the state. This was dubbed the “republican
model” of laïcité. In fact, as Jean Baubérot (the lone
dissenting member of the Stasi commission and a historian of
laïcité) has pointed out, the idea of laïcité has had a long history
in France, and some of its deﬁnitions are very much at
odds with the deﬁnition offered in the heat of the headscarf
controversy. There is at least one other “model” of laïcité, a
“democratic model,” that some diehards dismiss as “AngloAmerican”
and hence foreign to France, but that Baubérot
places squarely within a French context (thus demonstrating
that there is more than one version of the story of laïcité). Between
1985 and 1990, he writes, the League of Education, a
confederation of societies of teachers and others interested in
education, offered a far-reaching plan. The left was in power at
this point, and was more open than it would later become to
thinking about how to address issues of difference that were
plaguing domestic politics. Baubérot writes that the league ﬁrst
revisited the founding texts of the doctrine, insisting on laïcité
as the “conscience of democracy,” an effort to “prevent the ossiSecularism
121
ﬁcation of scientiﬁc thought into dogma,” and “to contain religion
within its limits without denying its immense cultural
signiﬁcance.”29
In the League’s proposals, which looked toward the year
2000, laïcité was a ground on which difﬁcult problems could be
assessed:
Take for example . . . the conﬂict which, among “children
of immigrants,” opposes the culture taught at school
and that handed down by the family. . . . In this situation,
to ensure “rights to the languages of emigration is a duty
of laïcité,” and a “bilingual education” must be promoted
in which “the thorough knowledge of the mother language
as the basis of the identity of an historic community”
is added to the “knowledge of a language of world
communication which enables full participation in universal
dialogue.” Moreover, it is necessary to abandon a
concept of the universal centered on Western values and
to recognize “the universal aspect contained in various
particular cultures.” French messianism, which considers
this country to be the bearer of universal values . . . is certainly
a precious heritage, but to be progressively rejuvenated
it must become a French contribution toward the
elaboration of a new universality, the outcome of an encounter
of cultures and values.
The school was the place where children would engage in the
kind of “reﬂection, criticism, [and] experimentation” that was
the hallmark of democracy. The greatest dangers to the
achievement of this democracy were seen to come from “‘civil
clerics’: abusive experts, a large state corps imbued with privi-
122  
leges, bosses by divine right, arrogant senior ofﬁcials invested
in their views as the only truth. The laïcité of the year 2000
must ensure that the citizens are not deprived of public debates
on essential questions relating to medical ethics, information,
education, etc.”30 In this vision the school is indeed a cradle of
democracy, in which differences are mediated and negotiated,
established practices are critically revisited and revised, and debate
is allowed to ﬂourish in the absence of dogmatic assertions
of immutable truth. In that sense, it is a preparation for
citizenship, for participation in the work of a nation conceptualized
as a heterogeneous entity, in which the differences of its
constituents are understood to be a resource, not a deﬁciency.
Baubérot concludes by suggesting that historically the two
models of secularism have long been in tension in France, that
the democratic model has already been applied to Christians
and Jews and that it “would be disastrous if . . . we were to apply
the republican model effectively only to Islam.”31 It is the
democratic model, he believes, that “constitutes an opportunity
for a future in which sociocultural and socioreligious conﬂicts
have been relatively mastered and contribute to the construction
of the future.” For Baubérot it is not religion but the republican
model that, by taking the religious and the secular to
be absolute opposites, poses the most dangerous obstacle to
democracy.
Secularism 123