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“Neither Right nor Left: French!”

Meeting the Ultra-Right Challenge in French Politics

This chapter analyzes the historical and contemporary contestations around religious signs in the French political system. Utilizing secondary historical data, government documents, and newspaper reports, and drawing further insight from the literature on political articulation, I argue that party political battles over who gets to “own” the religious signs issue in France have shaped the meaning(s) that politicians apply to republicanism in contemporary debates over the face veil.

My analysis focuses on critical historical junctures in which alliances and conflicts formed among three political parties: the right-wing UMP (since renamed Les Républicains, “The Republicans”), the left-wing Socialists, and the ultra-right Front National. Highly established and institutionalized, the former two parties have traditionally profiled themselves in terms of their contrasting economic agendas. Although periodically relevant, the issues of secularism and religious integration have not traditionally shaped the “axis of competition” between them. By contrast, the Front National is known for profiling itself in ways that intentionally defy established norms of party political contention in France. Founded in the early 1970s, but rising in electoral significance since the 1980s, this political party has largely branded itself according to “non-material” issues, like the threat of immigration to French national identity and culture.

I argue below that the dynamics of contestation that have arisen among these three parties shape the meaning(s) that politicians attach to republicanism - particularly laïcité – in France, with important consequences for articulating the gendered and racialized parameters of nationhood in the face veil debate. In particular, I maintain that by linking immigration to a proclaimed “crisis” in French national identity, the Front National put pressure on its competitors to take more explicit – and indeed more restrictive – positions on issues, like veiling, that have not traditionally been bases of contention. As they struggled to maintain their political territories in the face of this ultra-right challenge, both the UMP and the Socialists embraced the curtailment of religious signs in French public space as a way of promoting both laïcité and other values commonly associated with republicanism. These commitments in turn justified a closed conception of French nationhood, which, as I show in later chapters, rests on exclusionary notions of belonging and citizenship.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: BIRTHPLACE OF TWO COMPETING NOTIONS OF NATIONHOOD

Successive and highly conflict-ridden nation-building periods have been pivotal to laying the ideational and institutional foundations of parties’ contemporary struggle to “own” the religious signs issue in France. To fully understand that struggle, we must look back at the event that gave birth to the republican discourse of French nationhood: the 1789 Revolution.1 This event crystallized two competing visions of church-state relations, which have since underpinned the politics of secularism in France. Put forward by conservative counter republicans, the first vision invoked the Gallican (the title assigned to the Catholic Church of France from 1682–1790) tradition, to promote an institutionalized state religion under the joint control of the Pope and the French monarch. This view contrasted sharply with that of a second group, the revolutionaries, whose nationalist vision centred on opposing the Catholic Church’s control over public affairs.² In the centuries since, strategies for delimiting the relationship between religion and the public sphere in France have oscillated between these two opposing conceptions.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1789 Revolution, the French state maintained a degree of control over the Catholic Church, requiring priests to demonstrate their allegiance to the constitution and persecuting those who refused. However, after the 1795 fall of Robespierre – a leading figure in the French Revolution – the state withdrew its support of all religions, guaranteeing religious freedom to all, but forbidding public religious expression, including the wearing of religious clothing, funeral processions, and bell ringing. However, this regime, which instituted a strict, privatized notion of faith and religious belief, was short-lived. In 1801, Napoleon introduced a renewed form of Gallicanism through a Concordat (an agreement between the Catholic Church and the state) with the pope, which required that the French state officially recognize Catholicism. However, the Napoleonic Civil Code established in 1804 also restricted the powers of the Church by requiring that a civil authority perform marriages, by permitting divorce, and by introducing state regulation of inheritance. This regime also granted the state control over secondary schools and universities, but left primary schools in the hands of the Church.3

Although they specified the terms of church-state relations, arrangements established during the Napoleonic era left unresolved the underlying tension between the religious anti-republicanism of the French countryside and the growing anti-religious sentiment in urban centres.⁴ This tension coincided with the antagonism emerging between “two Frances”: the conservative and Catholic tradition of the provinces and atheistic and socialist Paris.⁵ This antagonism was manifested in the growing gap between institutional, state-driven secular initiatives and the remaining cultural and moral salience of religion. With the Napoleonic Civil Code, the Catholic Church lost much of its institutional hold over the terms of public life in education, medicine, and law. Increasingly, governance over these spheres became inscribed in the logic of nation-statehood. Yet, religion remained highly significant as a moral and symbolic foundation for national belonging. Under Napoleon’s reign, Catholicism gained recognition as “the religion of a large majority of Frenchmen,” while minority religions – namely reformed and Lutheran Protestantism and Judaism – were, due in part to their militantism, credited with recognition by the state.⁶

The “double logic”⁷ thus instilled during the Napoleonic era served as the basis for a continuing oscillation between republican and counter-republican discourses of nationhood in nineteenth-century France. That conflict came to a head in the violent uprisings of the Paris Commune that followed the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. These events launched the Third Republic (1870–1940), an era of massive social and ideological transformation, during which rapid industrialization, advances in transportation and communications technology, and eroding local sources of belonging – such as churches and local professional bodies – combined to produce a sense of nationhood that transcended geographic boundaries. Rural regions previously isolated from urban centres became the main targets of a state-led “civilizing” and modernizing project, which aimed to reorient France’s diverse populace toward national, rather than local, concerns.8 Along with the legacy of the Franco-Prussian War, the creation of the national anthem and the 1880 introduction of 14 July – “Bastille Day”⁹ – as a national holiday solidified the perception of a shared national identity. A consolidated public education system helped to disseminate these national symbols to the masses, creating an unprecedented and publicly visible sense of “national community.”¹⁰

Steps toward institutionalizing the religious neutrality of the French state served this broader quest to instill the conception of a national “we.” With the Jules Ferry laws of the 1880s – which established free, mandatory, and secular education – the school replaced the church as the key source of knowledge about the world, becoming the inculcator of nationhood and patriotism on a national scale.¹¹ From this point forward, teachers in France’s public schools would have to be lay people (not priests), and only secular teachings were allowed in the classroom.¹² Within a decade, an entire generation of previously “uncivilized” French school children would gain knowledge and competencies – including proficiency in the French language – that transcended the needs, and indeed the horizons, of their local communities.¹³

Yet, attempts to secure a state monopoly over education in the 1880s were only partly successful. Even though many no longer adhered to the moral dogmas of Catholicism, 97 per cent of French citizens remained notionally Catholic during this period. As a result, there was significant popular interest in maintaining the religious rites surrounding baptism, marriage, and burial.¹⁴ Therefore, and despite the measures adopted through the Ferry laws, there remained for many decades “two school systems” – one religious and the other secular – whose curricula cultivated distinct visions of French society. In this way, the tension between a secular and a religious conception of nationhood remained notwithstanding state-led secular initiatives at the legal and institutional levels.¹⁵

The institutionally embedded tension between “two Frances” also took on important gendered dimensions with the sweeping secularizing reforms of the nineteenth century. While contemporary advocates of religious restriction have framed gender equality as the fruit of secularism, Scott has challenged that interpretation, demonstrating that secularization also brought about new and distinct forms of gender inequality, which were predicated on the division carved between the public and private spheres. Whereas the public sphere became the locus of male activity – in which reasonable debate was to take place, and where matters of state, rights, and citizenship were to be addressed – the private sphere became the home of passion and religious tradition, two traits that were read as feminine in the national cultural repertoire. In other words, the secularizing initiatives that marked nation-building in nineteenth-century France enabled a relegation of femininity to the private sphere, as women became “angels in the house,” while men occupied the realm of the public and the political.16

The newly formed and increasingly secular French national identity of the nineteenth century was put under increased pressure by intensifying immigration levels in the 1870s and 1880s. Without the mass rural exodus that had urbanized Germany and Britain’s populations, French capitalists sought to fill labour shortages by drawing on foreign workers, whom they largely recruited from other European countries such as Italy, Poland, and Spain. The resulting influx of migrants provoked a backlash from the native-born working classes, prompting professional bodies to organize around questions of nationality, seeking to keep out foreigners.¹⁷ Aware of the electoral payoff to be gained from drawing on fear of incoming foreigners, politicians proposed legislation to limit the benefits of French citizenship for newcomers.¹⁸ Although the native-born children of parents born outside France were allowed to naturalize as of 1889, these new citizens did not share all of the rights of French nationals; a line was drawn internally between citizens who were “nationals” and those who remained “outsiders.”¹⁹

Tensions around immigration intersected with ongoing struggles over church-state relations in the Dreyfus Affair of 1898–99. This event, which involved accusations of treason against a Jewish military captain, brought to the fore the anti-Semitic sentiment that underlay much of the counter-republican movement.²⁰ Pro-Church forces took advantage of this scandal to cast a negative light on the institutional separation of church and state and to call for the re-establishment of Catholicism’s governing powers. However, the vindication of Captain Dreyfus, combined with the advance of public secular education in the 1880s, forced Catholic conservatives to concede ground, eventually leading them to accept republicanism in some form. The resulting republican “synthesis” combined elements of the socialist left and the Catholic right and shaped the definition of French national identity until the Vichy regime dismantled it in the Second World War.21

However, partisan divisions continued to play an important role in articulations of French nationhood during this period. Seeking to offset the growing political influence of the industrial working class, right-wing conservatives crafted a narrative that emphasized the rural and Catholic dimensions of belonging, and romanticized a way of life increasingly threatened by modernization, immigration, and international conflict.²² Actors deploying this script portrayed immigrants and Jews, two groups widely deemed incapable of true loyalty to France, as the “other.”²³ An emerging leftist contingent opposed this vision, offering its own future-oriented national script, which saw public education as crucial to producing a literate, autonomous, and rational populace, capable of resisting religious dogmatism and opposing the determinism of the conservative ethos.²⁴

These public figures on the left, many of them part of a coalition known as the Bloc des gauches (Leftist Bloc), became the main architects of the 1905 Law of Separation between Church and State, which abolished the power of the Concordat to regulate relationships between the French state and “recognized religions.” The final version of the law defines secularism in terms of individuals’ right to the free exercise of religion (article 1) and the non-subsidization of religion by the state (article 2).²⁵ By adopting these measures, the 1905 law marked the end of the Concordat, which gave semi-official status to Catholicism in France. Yet, two exceptions remained. First, the law contained a provision promising to maintain chaplaincy services in isolated spaces such as prisons, hospitals, the army, and boarding schools. The second exception to the 1905 law concerns the attribution of state funds to maintain religious buildings – churches, temples, and synagogues – that had previously been public property.²⁶

Importantly, the institutional secularism established by the 1905 law also did not apply in French colonial territories, such as Algeria. In these jurisdictions, religion continued to be promulgated as a basis of attachment and loyalty to the French Empire. Even the anticlerical forces of the metropolis favoured the maintenance of Catholic schools in colonized territories as spaces in which to educate future elites.27

Although the 1905 law embodied a pragmatic and liberal interpretation of secularism,²⁸ it was not the object of a complete consensus in the French parliament. Three other interpretations of laïcité also prevailed during this period. The first saw laïcité as a vehicle for destroying the Catholic Church and de-Christianizing French society. A second view, advocated by followers of Emile Combes, who was leader of the leftist cabinet at the time of the 1905 law, emphasized the need to end privileges for clergymen, but maintained that the state should have control of the church. A third and final interpretation sought to republicanize or democratize the church itself.²⁹

The ideological tensions around the meaning(s) of laïcité and nationhood that were established during the nineteenth century – most notably that between a republican secular outlook based on freedom of religion and expression, and a counter-republican image of France emphasizing its Catholic roots – laid the ideational foundations of the current struggle over Islamic signs. Indeed, as I will show, these tensions continue to orient partisan debates around ways to apply laïcité in the context of rising immigration to France. At the same time, because of competition among parties to “own” the religious signs issue, those debates have been obscured by a proclaimed cross-party consensus around the need to protect laïcité by restricting (certain) religious signs in France’s public sphere.

FRANCE: A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS?

Although France is now considered a country of immigration, permanent resettlement “has never achieved the legitimacy that it has enjoyed in the United States or Canada,” for example.³⁰ This is partly due to the fact that, until relatively recently, immigration to France was conceived in largely temporary terms, as a mechanism through which to fill short-term labour shortages. In more recent decades, the proliferation of long-term settlement, combined with the shift in immigrant origins from primarily European countries to former North African colonies, has introduced new controversies around immigration in France, a partial outcome of which is the debate over Islamic religious signs.

Until the mid-twentieth century, French employers were the primary actors responsible for organizing immigration to France, with the state occasionally intervening to halt arrivals in large numbers. The country’s first major wave of migration began in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when declining fertility and a delayed rural exodus prompted French industrialists to seek foreign labour. By 1900, the largest proportion of foreigners hailed from Belgium and Germany, with increasing numbers arriving from Italy and Poland by the 1920s.31 Changes in the characteristics of French immigration – including a shift in settlers’ origins and their growing tendency toward long-term stay – prompted virulent nativist and anti-immigrant campaigns in the postwar period. Beginning in 1946, the French state began to fill labour shortages by accepting increasing numbers of temporary workers from its colonies in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria (a protectorate of France until 1962). Mostly men looking to send remittances and eventually return to their countries of origin, these temporary workers were treated as “visitors” to France. Keeping their practice of Islam minimal, they did not expect, nor receive, permanent rights or recognition from the French state.³²

As immigration from France’s North African colonies accelerated and took on a more settled character in the 1960s, the tenor of antiimmigrant campaigns became especially hostile. Despite initially being granted a privileged legal status due to their countries’ colonial ties to France, newcomers from this region became the subjects of increasingly concerted attempts to thwart access to permanent citizenship.³³ These attempts coincided with a new phase in the struggle over French national identity, one that has defined the terms of struggle over the boundaries of French politics ever since. During this period, the resurgence of capitalism and the construction of a global diplomatic infrastructure fostered a forward-thinking republican narrative centred on universal rights. Although conservative politicians did not abandon their concern about foreigners and immigration, they refrained from orienting their political platforms around these issues, recognizing the destructive effects of xenophobic attitudes.³⁴ The postwar generation also bore witness to a period of wide-scale social upheaval, with previously isolated rural populations navigating their way to France’s growing urban centres.

The resulting identity struggles culminated in the protests of May 1968, which solidified a left-wing vision that broke significantly with the prior leftist script. Rather than seeing national identity as simply the product of historical fact, participants in this movement saw it as demanding a critical rethinking of the republican social project, one that would embrace previously marginalized populations and identities. An emerging multicultural discourse thus became the vehicle for a postcolonial denunciation of the assimilationist practices of the French state, particularly those directed at France’s Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan populations.35

This vision provoked a backlash among right-wing conservatives who, by the 1980s, were less able to contain anti-immigrant sentiment within their ranks. The increasing visibility of the Arab-Muslim population, mostly from Algeria, contributed to the conflict over French national identity. Two factors exacerbated tensions around this community. First, economic recession embittered French-born citizens who believed that Algerian workers, whom many continued to view as former colonial subjects rather than full-fledged French citizens, were taking precious jobs away from those born in mainland France. By the 1950s, male French citizens from Algeria, and migrants from Tunisia and Morocco, were increasingly being joined by their spouses and children, giving the French North African community a more settled character. The oil crises of the 1970s hit this community hard, creating high joblessness rates and intensifying the reliance on social services.³⁶ Second, the native-born children of Algerians – known as “Beurs” – were beginning to demand their rights as full-fledged French citizens, marching across France in 1983 in a national call for labour market equality and an end to racist violence. The “Beurs” were split into different camps. One contingent sought mainstream representation and campaigned for colour-blind equality in the Socialist Party and civic organizations like sos Racisme, an anti-racist NGO founded in 1984. A second contingent sought more meaningful recognition of the community’s Muslim identity, which it fought for through activism in pro-Islamic associations. Committed to demonstrating that one can be both Muslim and French, members of the latter group engaged in increasingly public forms of religious practice, by building mosques, participating in public rituals such as group prayer, and adopting religious dress.³⁷

Public concern over the integration of French North Africans – who are concentrated mainly in city suburbs where rates of unemployment are high and housing is deteriorating – has continued to foster efforts to limit access to French citizenship. “Franco-Algerians” and their children were the central targets of the debate surrounding France’s Nationality Code, which culminated in the highly restrictive Pasqua Laws of 1993.³⁸ Among other things, these laws revoked the automatic attribution of citizenship to children born in France to foreign-born parents. Although this and other restrictive aspects of the law were later modified, new restrictions have since been introduced. Following the right-wing return to power in 2002, the French government issued new limitations on foreigners’ access to French visas and nationality, particularly for foreign spouses.39

Citizenship rates – particularly among North African migrants – remain remarkably low in France. According to the results of the 2008 Trajectories and Origins survey, the proportion of those with French nationality ranges from 45 per cent among Algerian migrants to 47 per cent among those arriving from Morocco and Tunisia.⁴⁰ These low rates are partly due to the substantial practical and administrative barriers that applicants face in gaining citizenship. In order to be approved, an applicant must pass several thresholds and meet requirements set by various governmental agencies. One of the main obstacles stems from the criterion of “acceptability,” which requires applicants to justify their “assimilation into the French community, primarily by sufficient knowledge of the French language.”⁴¹ This criterion became especially important following the rise in immigration from Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1970s. During this period, the definition of assimilation was expanded to include “accepting French values, especially when candidates practiced polygamy or wore Islamic headscarves, despite the fact that administrative tribunals discourage such approaches.”⁴²

Just as the Franco-Prussian War served as a reference point for the definition of French national identity in the Third Republic, “Arabs” and “Muslims” became the “other” that shaped the terms of political debate regarding national belonging from the 1980s onward.⁴³ It is in this political climate that the populist and ultra-right Front National gained strength and, through its adoption of a nation “in crisis” script, launched a period of heightened contestation over the configuration of French politics and of French nationhood itself.

NAVIGATING A CLASS-BASED POLITICS: THE SOCIALIST AND UMP PARTIES

In order to understand how political parties’ articulation of the boundaries of the electoral sphere has shaped the unfolding of France’s secularism debate, it is necessary to first identify the particularities of the French electoral system. This system is highly unique in that it utilizes a two-round approach to electing both presidential and parliamentary candidates. As I will show below, the mechanical and psychological effects of this system44 have helped to crystallize the contemporary right and left political camps in France, which until very recently have been overwhelmingly dominated by the UMP and Socialist parties.⁴⁵

The French political system favours large parties and parties that can foster a broad consensus. In the case of presidential elections, the top two candidates advance to a run-off election in the second round – unless a candidate receives more than 50 per cent on the first ballot. In legislative elections, all candidates who receive the support of at least 12.5 per cent of registered electors are considered in the second round – unless, once again, the 50 per cent threshold is surpassed in the first round.⁴⁶

Under this two-round system, large parties tend to be systematically overrepresented. In particular, parties that attract 20 per cent or more of the vote receive a higher number of seats than is warranted by their actual representation in the electorate. Parties involved in coalitions, which are common in the French political system, also benefit.⁴⁷ From a psychological standpoint, France’s two-round system encourages majority outcomes by incentivizing strategic voting in two ways. First, voters who favour a party that has little chance of reaching the second ballot may choose to vote for a party that stands a better chance of passing this threshold. Second, voters whose preferred party is likely to enter the second round may choose to vote for a party against which they believe their candidate will have the strongest chance of winning.⁴⁸

By advantaging large political parties, France’s two-round electoral system has helped to solidify two “antagonistically related ideological camps.”⁴⁹ The make-up of those camps has changed dramatically since the 1970s. Beginning in that decade, the left-wing camp saw a marked shift in power from the Parti communiste français (Communist Party of France, PCF) to the Socialists. Meanwhile, on the right side of the aisle, the key development has been the consolidation of (most) opposing parties under a single roof – the UMP – since 2002.

Until the late 1970s, the PCF enjoyed an advantage over the PS in legislative elections. This advantage came to an end with the rise of the Socialist Party in the 1978 legislative and 1981 presidential elections.⁵⁰ After becoming the leading voice of the left in electoral politics, the Socialist Party worked hard to consolidate diverse progressive viewpoints and incorporate radical and dissenting voices into its platform. Beginning in the 1970s, “new social movements” focusing on issues from feminism to the environment emerged as an alternative to the traditional axis of electoral contention in France. Despite the initial hostility of the major parties to competition from these alternative perspectives, Socialist Party elites largely succeeded in neutralizing or co-opting these issues for political gain.51 Two main motivations underlay this attempt at co-optation. First, “new” political issues appealed to France’s growing middle class, a key constituency of interest to the party. Second, there was “electoral capital” to be gained from these attempts at ownership. In particular, the necessity of attracting votes in the second round of elections encouraged the party to appear “open” to other currents within the left.⁵² In this way, the Socialists’ desire to diffuse opposition from left-wing competitors is partly accounted for by the two-round system and the constraints it imposes on the success of small parties.⁵³

Attempts to gain ownership of “new” political issues, in part as a way to attract the growing middle class vote, have produced a complex relationship to the working class – and to class ideology more generally – within the French Socialist Party. In his attempts to make the PS the “hegemonic party” of the left, for instance, the Socialist leader in the 1970s, François Mitterrand, challenged the “materialist” orientation that had been the hallmark of the Communist Party brand and pursued an “ideological renovation” that has shaped the Socialists’ role in French politics ever since. Although continuing to compete with the PCF (and with other further left parties) for blue-collar votes, the party effectively became one of “white-collar middle-class membership and votes.”⁵⁴ Ironically, the more successful the party’s leadership has been in rebalancing the left electorally, the more conservative it has become in promoting the “post-material” issues that served to differentiate it from its Communist competitor.⁵⁵ For example, as it increased its electoral support, the Socialist Party has become less open to the influence of dissenting feminist voices. The dominance of national electoral concerns has frustrated many members of this group who regret the party’s militant “de-mobilization.”⁵⁶

The ongoing tendency toward “de-mobilization” – and the related strategy of downplaying traditional class concerns – has diluted the Socialist Party brand in the long run. In the 2002 election, the party became destabilized when its presidential candidate, Lionel Jospin, announced that he was “not a Socialist.”57 This comment, combined with Jospin’s general reluctance to engage with the struggles of the industrial working class,⁵⁸ alienated left-wing voters and contributed to the Socialists’ failure to reach the second ballot in that election. Nonetheless, while the Socialist Party became more centrist in its economic platform and less anti-capitalist, it remained focused on “bread-and-butter” issues, that is, on advancing the economic interests of its constituents, for example through policies regarding retirement and pensions, workers’ pay, benefits, purchasing power, and hours of work. This was not surprising, given that unemployment rates began to rise in the early 1980s and have remained high ever since.

While the trajectory of France’s left-wing political bloc has been driven by efforts at co-optation, on the right the key struggle has been over the consolidation of numerous and competing political parties. The central plot line in this regard has been the growing predominance of the Rassemblement pour la république (Rally for the Republic, RPR), particularly from the late 1980s onward, and the related electoral decline of other right-wing parties, including the more centrist Union pour la démocratie française (Union for French Democracy, UDF).⁵⁹ The RPR consolidated its power in 2002 when its leadership launched a new party – the UMP – whose membership combined representatives from numerous parties, though principally the RPR.⁶⁰ The impetus for the party’s formation was twofold. The first motivation was to restore the authority of the RPR president, Jacques Chirac, following a poor performance in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections. The second, more institutional imperative underlying the creation of the UMP was to tighten the connection between the legislative and presidential aspects of the French political system. Although a normative system of cooperation dictated that parties on the right support each other in various ways – including by not threatening other parties’ incumbency in particular ridings – adherence to these norms was not guaranteed.⁶¹ As such, following his election to the presidency in 2002, Chirac felt he could no longer rely solely on the RPR for predominance in the legislative elections, and thus sought to consolidate his power through the creation of the UMP.

The positioning of the two traditional parties – the Socialists and the UMP – on key issues such as immigration is at least in part informed by the economic or class interests of their constituents. As the all-encompassing party of the left until 2017, the Socialists have traditionally fared much better in low-income constituencies, many of which comprise large numbers of residents of North African origin.62 By contrast, the UMP has drawn much of its support from shopkeepers, craftsmen, and farmers, who tend to concentrate in more rural, less diverse areas.⁶³ In theory, therefore, appealing to a discourse of national identity “crisis” should raise more difficult dilemmas for the Socialists than for the UMP, by threatening to alienate the party’s core constituencies, including Muslims. At the same time, however, Muslims’ support for the Socialists is so overwhelming that the party has been able to rely on this constituency in elections. In 2012, for example, an extraordinary 93 per cent of French Muslims cast their votes in favour of the Socialist candidate for president, François Hollande.⁶⁴

ENTER THE FRONT NATIONAL

Founded on the heels of the 1973 oil crisis, which hit France’s industrial working class regions particularly hard, the Front National began as a party committed to protecting France from “foreign” political, economic, and cultural threats,⁶⁵ particularly those associated with communism and Marxist thought.⁶⁶ In its early stages, the party also drew significantly from themes associated with the Poujadiste movement, an anti-parliamentarian, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic group formed in the 1950s and backed by artisans and shopkeepers. The Front National’s founding leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was himself a Poujadiste MP in the National Assembly during his youth. When he created the party, Le Pen invoked Poujadiste themes as a way of drawing together a heterogeneous collection of actors, including monarchists, former Nazi collaborators, traditionalist Catholics, and counter-revolutionaries.⁶⁷

The Front National remained a sort of loose-fitting and relatively ineffective coalition of such groups until 1983, when its electoral breakthrough in the municipal elections of Dreux, a town in Northern France, marked its real take-off. Three years later, the party gained an unprecedented thirty-five seats in the National Assembly. This victory was partly enabled by President Mitterrand’s introduction of proportional representation.⁶⁸ But it also stemmed from what Schain calls the FN’s “reservoir of legitimacy.”⁶⁹ From his party’s inception, Jean-Marie Le Pen was able to capitalize on the anti-immigrant discourses that distinguished the Communist Party brand until its decline in the late 1970s. Indeed, prior to the creation of the FN, the Communist Party had been a principal vehicle “through which the immigration issue had been politically defined.”70 When the party lost electoral ground, the FN became the primary spokes-vehicle for anti-immigrant concerns, which by then had begun to resonate with voters.

The strength of attitudes to immigration in predicting the FN vote quickly distinguished the party as one whose fate would be determined by “issue voting.” Yet, from its inception, the FN also managed to secure a relatively loyal following. In the 1980s, the party drew much of its support from artisans and shopkeepers, but also many in the liberal professions earning high incomes. In addition, more than two-thirds of its voters were non-practising Catholics, 60 per cent were male, and a majority were between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-five. Thus, in terms of age, sex, and income, early supporters of the Front National were “more likely than most voters to be stable and committed partisans.”⁷¹ By attracting these constituencies to his party, Le Pen built a base that expanded through the 1980s.

Although the revocation of proportional representation in 1986 put an end to the Front National’s early success in the National Assembly, the party continued to increase its support in regional and presidential races, with Le Pen making a stunning breakthrough to the second round of the 2002 presidential elections, with 16.86 per cent of the vote in the first round, and his daughter and successor, Marine Le Pen, polling 17.9 per cent of votes in 2012⁷² before advancing to the second round of the 2017 race for the presidency.⁷³

In its more than forty years of existence, the Front National has varied its methods for articulating the concerns of French voters. In the 1990s, the party shifted its focus from the dangers of communism, Marxist thought, and Soviet Russia to the ways that Europeanization, and the global capitalist relations to which it contributed, threatened France’s ability to govern its own cultural and economic affairs. Of growing concern to voters across the ideological spectrum, the question of France’s future within a consolidated Europe became the key discursive vehicle by which Jean-Marie Le Pen and his associates presented themselves as capable of “overcoming the sectarian tendencies of the mainstream French left and right.”⁷⁴ The significance of this tactic to the Front National’s political brand became evident in its 1997 congress in Strasbourg, when the party adopted the slogan “Neither right nor left: French!”75

This rejection of left-right terminology – and consequently of the established class-based axis of competition – enabled Le Pen to claim, in the context of debate over Europe’s expanding competencies in areas like immigration, security, and currency, that “a vote for him was a vote for France.”⁷⁶ This strategy proved increasingly successful as the mainstream parties on the right and left converged around a program that was pro-Europe and, by extension, pro-globalization. That convergence was pivotal to the Front National’s positioning within the French electoral system, as it enabled Le Pen to utilize elements of left-wing rhetoric – such as anti-capitalism – in forging a discourse that he could then market as broadly “French.”⁷⁷

With the start of the new millennium, a second of the Front National’s most defining political claims – that immigrants are taking precious jobs away from native French citizens and thus threatening the social fabric of the nation – gained prominence. This claim has consistently polled well with working-class voters, particularly those who inhabit France’s older industrial and urbanized regions, which also contain large numbers of immigrants from North Africa. These are the areas that have been hardest hit by economic crisis and where feelings of fear and insecurity are most acute.⁷⁸ The Front National’s anti-immigrant platform was also compatible with its anti-European stance, as both positions hinged on a proclaimed need to strengthen and secure the territorial, as well as the cultural, boundaries of the French nation.

Recently, the Front National has turned its sights on “de-demonizing”⁷⁹ and “normalizing”⁸⁰ its political brand in order to expand its political base. One of the ways it has effected this transformation is by appointing a woman – Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen – to its top post. Elected party leader in 2011, after holding a prominent position in the FN since 2002, Marine Le Pen has appealed to voters by combining a kind of “familial charisma” inherited from her father with an ability to distinguish herself – partly through the fact that she is a woman – as an outsider to mainstream politics.⁸¹ This unique combination affords Le Pen a highly distinctive status in the French electoral sphere. As Geva puts it, by being the “political daughter,” she can “play the role of game-changer, distant from technocratic and ultraliberal political elites, and yet keeper of the FN tradition.”⁸² By providing the FN with a “softer, more domesticated and feminine” image, Marine Le Pen has made her party’s message more palatable to a mainstream French audience.83

While seeking to “normalize” her party’s brand, Marine Le Pen has not turned back on her father’s commitment to destabilizing France’s axis of competition by articulating a message that transcends traditional class cleavages. In addition to her working-class base, she has also reached out to skilled workers. While they “think of themselves as removed from the upper echelons of society,” Wieviorka has argued that many such workers are “at pains to differentiate themselves from the lower reaches of society, which they conceive as a mix of immigrants who refuse to integrate and prefer to live on social welfare benefits, the poor who take advantage of state assistance, and young people who are nothing more than ‘riff raff.’”⁸⁴ In order to link the concerns of skilled voters to her working-class base, Marine Le Pen has characterized these groups collectively as the “invisible” and the “forgotten,” two terms that she also uses to interpolate farmers, the unemployed, and pensioners.⁸⁵

By unifying disparate constituencies around a culturally and economically protectionist program, the Front National has succeeded in upsetting established voter-party alignments in France. In its early days, when it most directly threatened the ideological territory of the centre-right, the party was the object of intense debate over how best to limit its effect on the distribution of right-wing votes. During his tenure as RPR prime minister under Socialist president François Mitterrand from 1986 to 1988,⁸⁶ Jacques Chirac sought to appease the Front National by proposing a model of second-generation citizenship acquisition that made the attribution of nationality to those born in France to foreign-born parents dependent on a voluntary act. However, the political costs of this reform combined with opposition from the Conseil d’État (Council of State) forced Chirac to back away from the proposal.⁸⁷ Later, in his campaign for re-election as president in 2002, Chirac changed tack, dissociating himself more explicitly from his Front National rival, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Fearing that Le Pen had gained ground, Chirac sought to keep him from winning the presidency in the second round of voting (with the RPR pitted against the Front National, the Socialist Party having been knocked out in the first round) by joining forces with the left in a “republican front.”⁸⁸ Although Chirac was easily re-elected in the second ballot with 82 per cent of the vote, this approach did not stem the long-term growth of the Front National’s electoral base. In fact, in many ways, the coming together of left and right voters to secure Chirac’s victory in the second round further entrenched what had become a key factor in Le Pen’s growing electoral success: an impression that the ideological boundaries between left and right in France were eroding.

Debates over how to respond to the Front National’s electoral rise continued to rage within the UMP, particularly in the aftermath of Le Pen’s unexpected breakthrough to the second round of the 2002 presidential elections. While some advocated incorporating Front National themes into the UMP platform, others resisted this option, preferring to maintain a clear distance from the party. Vacillation between these alternatives has manifested itself in “contradictions and fluctuations” in the UMP rhetoric.89 Former president Nicolas Sarkozy embodies this phenomenon. His discourse and action on immigration control diverged significantly from earlier centre-right handling of these issues,⁹⁰ earning him a reputation as a “neo-FN” right-wing politician.⁹¹

By focusing increasingly on globalization’s displacement of French workers, and calling for the state to play a greater role in the economy, the Front National has also begun to tread on the territory of the French political left. In recent years, the party has “permeated” workers’ organizations “from the ground up” and reconciled with teachers, a group with whom it previously shared a mutual antipathy.⁹² Marine Le Pen’s Front National has also broken with the party’s past by explicitly embracing the state as “an essential component of the soul of France.”⁹³ This strategic embrace of state intervention – linked to what others have referred to as the party’s “state nationalism”⁹⁴ and “ethno-socialist” framing of inequality⁹⁵ – is part and parcel of the party’s effort to attract an electorate perceived as “imbued with a culture of the left.”⁹⁶

The presence of the Front National has thus significantly destabilized the left-right ideological blocs that have traditionally constituted the main axis of competition in France. By forcing its rivals to engage – through either cooperation or outright opposition – with issues not historically relevant to their platforms, the party has redrawn the boundaries of French political space. Along with domestic and world events that heighten the public’s concerns around immigration, it has made it nearly impossible for its rivals to run a political campaign in which newcomers’ integration and “radical” Islam are not front and centre. The Front National has also made it difficult for the major parties to market themselves as diverging in their responses to this question. Indeed, Marine Le Pen is fond of portraying her main political rivals as essentially indistinguishable. For example, in the 2012 presidential election campaign, she spoke about the “Siamese-twins” Sarkozy (UMP) and Hollande (Socialist Party), whom she characterized as “two representatives of the UMPS (a combination of UMP and PS) system who stage a mock fight.”97

With the Front National successfully manipulating popular unrest over immigration and diversity since the 1980s, the UMP and Socialists have found themselves in the position of having to decide between rejecting their rival’s anti-immigrant stance outright and attempting to co-opt the Front National by adopting a tougher line on immigration and diversity issues. I will show below that, while both tactics have been employed at various times, pressure to appear tough on “radical” Islam has led the UMP and Socialists to embrace the restriction of religious signs. Moreover, in seeking to justify this move as consistent with French republicanism, both parties have articulated the boundaries of republican nationhood and politics in increasingly narrow and exclusionary terms.

DEMARCATING THE BOUNDARIES OF POLITICS DURING AND AFTER THE 1989 “HEADSCARF AFFAIR”

According to de Leon and colleagues, the characteristics of the existing social order critically shape parties’ capacity to rearticulate the boundaries of electoral politics in a given period.⁹⁸ Because prior articulations can have lasting and constraining effects, periods of social transformation are more conducive to rearticulation. Such transformative circumstances were present in France at the time of the 1989 “headscarf affair.” By that year, the growth of the French Muslim population had combined with global controversies – notably the fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie for his portrayal of Mohammed in The Satanic Verses – to spark public debate over the place of Islam in France. That debate was further intensified by the mobilization of the “Beurs” generation,⁹⁹ whose members were beginning to demand their rights as full-fledged French citizens.¹⁰⁰

These international and domestic shifts set the stage for rearticulating the “blocs”¹⁰¹ that constitute the French electoral system. In particular, they enabled the Front National to mobilize previously apolitical constituencies around anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim positions, sending shockwaves through French politics in the process. In responding, the traditional parties – particularly the Socialists – found themselves constrained, both by their own historic programs and by their pre-existing positions vis-à-vis the axis of competition. These parties had to be creative in refashioning prior political articulations, which they did in large part by injecting aspects of the Front National’s ethnic nationalism into their own more civic and republican discourses of French nationhood.

The “headscarf affair” of 1989 involved the expulsion of three Muslim girls by a school in Creil (northeast of Paris) for wearing the headscarf. Although the girls agreed, following negotiations with the school principal, to remove their scarves in the classroom, that event sparked a nation-wide debate over the meaning of French laïcité and the school’s symbolic role as inculcator of republican values.102 The UMP’s eventual lead in this debate pushed the rhetoric around Muslim religious integration rightward, causing a deep crisis of legitimacy on the left, particularly among Socialists, who felt increasing pressure to demonstrate their dedication to preserving the secularity of public space.

When the “headscarf affair” initially broke out in 1989, the major political parties were reluctant to take a definitive stance on the issue. Hoping to lessen public concern while maintaining an arm’s length approach, the Socialist minister of education, Lionel Jospin, referred the question to the Conseil d’État. Although its decisions are not binding, the Conseil provides a check on the administrative and executive powers of the French state. A historic defender of liberal and republican principles – mainly equality of individuals before the law – it continues to function as a mediator in state-individual relations in France. Governments have traditionally deferred to the Conseil in matters concerning the legality of state actions and the wording of bills, as well as in deciding whether a piece of legislation passes the test of French jurisprudence. Its elite status and historic legacy afford the Conseil a unique ability to deflect government efforts to restrict immigration. In this case, the Court’s advice – that school principals should be allowed to determine on a case-by-case basis whether headscarf-wearing girls were engaging in propaganda – resolved the headscarf issue, but only temporarily.

In 1994, François Bayrou, the minister of education in an RPR-dom-inated National Assembly, resurrected the issue by announcing the prohibition of ostentatious religious signs in all schools. Although this second round of debate subsided when the Conseil d’État reaffirmed its initial ruling,103 it was quickly revived by right-wing politicians who, under the banner of the newly formed UMP, sought to capture the religious signs issue for their own political gain. In 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of the interior in President Jacques Chirac’s government, introduced a policy to prohibit facial coverings in official identity photographs. When debate over this policy sparked a broader discussion of religious signs in schools, Chirac appointed Bernard Stasi, the French ombudsman and former government minister, to head an independent investigation – composed of twenty members from a wide variety of backgrounds, including teachers, academics, jurists, politicians, and school administrators – into the political and legal parameters of laïcité in France, focusing on the public school system. Between September and December of 2003, the Stasi commission board heard testimony from 140 teachers, intellectuals, politicians, and activists.¹⁰⁴ One of its twenty recommendations – that ostentatious religious signs should be prohibited in public schools – was instituted as law in October 2004.

Throughout his tenure as minister of the interior and later as the UMP’s candidate in the 2007 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy continued to position himself as the most suitable candidate to defeat the Front National. In doing so, he adopted shifting and contradictory approaches to defining republicanism and its relationship to Islam, earning himself a reputation as a highly ambiguous figure in French politics. In his early years as minister of the interior, Sarkozy sought to institutionalize the role of Islam within France by establishing umbrella organizations under the supervision of the state. In 2003, he created the Conseil français du culte musulman (The French Council of the Muslim Faith, CFCM), bringing together France’s three largest Muslim organizations – the Great Mosque of Paris, the Fédération nationale des musulmans de France (National Federation of French Muslims, FNMF), and the Union des organisations musulmanes de France (Union of Islamic Organizations of France, UOIF) – into a single and centralized body tasked with representing Muslim interests in policy discussions with the state. The first of the CFCM’s constituent bodies – the Great Mosque of Paris – was then perceived by government elites as the strongest force for “moderation” in the French Muslim community.¹⁰⁵ Supported by the Algerian government, this institution is affiliated with numerous other mosques. The second organization to become part of the CFCM umbrella in 2003, the FNMF, was founded in 1985 as an alternative to the Great Mosque. With ties to Morocco, it has historically drawn the support of French converts to Islam. Finally, the UOIF is the most visible and politically controversial member of the CFCM. Founded in 1983, it represents local cultural and mosque-affiliated Muslim associations throughout France. The UOIF gained national significance in 1989, when it supported the girls expelled from school in the famous “headscarf affair.”106

At the time of the CFCM’s creation, many believed it would finally allow the French state to incorporate Islam into its republican compact. In its early days, the organization fulfilled these expectations, providing the government with a legitimate instrument with which to supervise key aspects of Muslim religious life in France, including the building and maintenance of mosques and the training of imams.¹⁰⁷ However, internal divisions and critical responses from the Muslim community subsequently rendered the CFCM an unstable and ineffective force in French politics on religious diversity. As I will explain in chapter 4, this organization nevertheless remains essential in granting legitimacy to the French state in matters tied to Islam and Islamic relations.

Although it secured him a reputation for being skilled in dealing with the French Muslim community, fraternization with Muslim groups like the UOIF also proved risky to Sarkozy’s career and public image. When he failed to place himself squarely behind the ban on ostentatious religious signs in schools in 2003 – in a move that appealed to his new Muslim allies – both the Front National and his own colleagues in the UMP attacked Sarkozy as a weak defender of French values. Recognizing that he had a strategic interest in taking a firmer stance on religious signs, Sarkozy reversed his position. In a speech delivered to representatives of Muslim organizations in April 2003, he announced his intention to institute stricter laws requiring French residents to uncover their faces when having identity photographs taken.¹⁰⁸ Later that year, Sarkozy also publicly endorsed a prohibition of religious signs in schools. Crafting an image of laïcité as a sacred aspect of French republicanism – one that dictated much of his future discourse on the topic – he claimed in a speech that “when I enter a mosque, I remove my shoes. When a young Muslim girl enters school, she must remove her headscarf.”¹⁰⁹ Both speeches, which shocked members of the Muslim community accustomed to seeing Sarkozy as an ally, helped place him ahead of Chirac as UMP candidate in the race for the presidency.

By adopting aspects of the Front National’s anti-Muslim stance, Sarkozy succeeded in recapturing a significant proportion of the votes lost by Chirac to Le Pen in 2002. On the eve of the first wave of the 2007 presidential election, 26 per cent of those who supported Le Pen in 2002 reported that they intended to vote for Sarkozy. Of those voters – whom commentators referred to as “lepéno-sarkozystes” – 94 per cent agreed with the statement that “there are too many immigrants in France” and 86 per cent expressed a negative view of Islam.110 Cooptation of FN themes also enabled Sarkozy to recapture geographic areas seized by Le Pen in 2002 – particularly in the north of France¹¹¹ – and to increase his support among Catholics, farmers, and voters over age fifty.¹¹²

Just as the UMP was increasing its share of the vote by co-opting Front National themes, the Socialists were falling behind in the battle to “own” the debate over religious signs. Rather than focusing her 2007 campaign for the presidency on this issue, the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, stuck to a traditional leftist discourse centred on issues of education, violence, purchasing power, and the environment. Moreover, while she spoke to the questions of violence and threats to security in France, Royal maintained that social and economic marginalization were at the root of these problems. She thus refused, to a large extent, to adopt a negative tone in characterizing immigration to France.¹¹³

This campaign strategy proved unsuccessful for Royal, who lost the 2007 race for the presidency, earning 46.94 per cent of the vote in the second round. Unlike Sarkozy, the Socialist candidate also profited little from the FN’s decline in that election, claiming only 6 per cent of Le Pen’s 2002 voters.¹¹⁴ Moreover, while she expanded the Socialists’ reach among blue-collar workers in the Western regions of France – who traditionally vote “yes” to Europe and “no” to Le Pen – Royal lost ground in large city suburbs¹¹⁵ and registered a far poorer showing than Sarkozy among Catholics, farmers, small-business owners, and artisans.¹¹⁶

Once elected president, Sarkozy strengthened his lead over the Socialists even further, by inviting religious Catholics – a key Front National constituency – to support him in establishing a renewed conception of laïcité, which embraces France’s Christian roots. In his famous Latran speech delivered as president in December 2007, he asserted that “Laïcité does not have the power to cut France from its Christian roots … To pull out the root is to erase the meaning [of laïcité], to weaken the cement of national identity, to further weaken those social relationships that crucially depend on symbols and memory. This is why we must hold together the two ends of the chain: assume the Christian roots of France – even develop them – while defending laïcité, which has finally matured.”117 By identifying Christianity (mainly Catholicism) as the cultural symbol that anchors the republican commitment to state secularism, Sarkozy sought to create a space for sympathizers of the Front National within the UMP, inviting them to endorse a discourse that he called laïcité positive (“positive secularism”). Recognizing the threat that this poses to her own electoral territory, Marine Le Pen has since responded by invoking a discourse of laïcité that similarly references the religion of the majority. In a section of its platform entitled Laïcité: une valeur au coeur du projet républicain (“Laïcité: a value at the heart of the republican project”), the Front National claimed that “Christianity was for a millennium and a half the religion of most, if not all, French people. It is normal that this fact should profoundly mark the French landscape and national culture. French traditions cannot be disregarded.”¹¹⁸ The fact that this statement appeared under the heading “laïcité” reveals a desire to demonstrate that, like Sarkozy’s UMP, the Front National is committed to making republicanism – and laïcité – compatible with France’s Christian roots. The effort to reconcile these two aspects of French national identity also speaks to the modern Front National’s desire to be taken seriously by mainstream politics. While, like her father, Le Pen remains committed to promoting an ethno-religious conception of nationhood that overtly excludes new immigrants, she also recognizes the rewards to be reaped from embracing republican themes that resonate with voters. Her efforts in this area speak to the malleability of extant ideas – like republicanism – in French political discourse.

By rendering the secularity of public spaces (mainly schools) almost sacred and by linking laïcité to France’s Catholic history, Sarkozy’s UMP and Marine Le Pen’s Front National transformed secularism from an organizing legal and institutional principle to a fundamental aspect of French national belonging. And in monopolizing the contours of laïcité, both parties also managed to discredit the Socialists as disloyal, elitist, and, in some cases, as collaborators in a Muslim ploy to denigrate French republican values and history.119 This critique has since gained ground in left-wing activist groups that bemoan the right’s “kidnapping” of laïcité for political gain. These groups have taken to blaming prior Socialist administrations for failing to take a firmer stance against “radical” Islamic practices, beginning with the “headscarf affair.”¹²⁰ In numerous editorials, publications, and blog posts, those in this camp assert that, by giving in to a “political correctness” that feeds into the right’s gross distortion of laïcité, “Socialists no longer know where they belong” on this question in French politics.¹²¹

This critique of the Socialist Party has also taken a firm hold in second wave feminist circles. Annie Sugier, who was president of the Ligue du droit international des femmes (International League for Women’s Rights) at the height of the face veil debate, sees secularism as a “legacy of the left,” which the right “poorly manipulates.” However, she also believes that “criticisms tied to colonialism and conflict with the United States have altered the left,” causing it to abandon the secular cause.¹²² Likewise, Michéle Vianès, president of Regards de femmes (Women’s Outlooks), maintains that she “quit the Socialist Party” in 1993 out of concern for the number of people who “supported the notion that, in the name of tolerance, we should allow the oppression of women.”¹²³

In the next section, I delve further into the role that feminists like Sugier and Vianès have played in demarcating the boundaries of political contention with respect to the religious signs issue in France. I show that while a pro-restriction feminist contingent has gained the attention of the French state by articulating a republican critique of veiling that aligns with the goals of pro-ban politicians, those on the anti-restriction side have been pushed to the margins of this debate.

CONTESTING THE BOUNDARIES OF FEMINISM: CONFRONTATIONS BETWEEN PRO- AND ANTI-RESTRICTION FEMINISTS IN FRANCE

Contestations over the boundaries of feminism are central to the French religious signs debate. Those contestations are informed by a historical dispute between two competing conceptions of gender (in)equality. The first – what many call “gender as sameness” – suggests that abstraction from difference is necessary for equal citizenship. Advocates of this approach thus reject recognition of the differences between men and women “as a precondition for equality.”124 An opposing conception – “gender as difference” – identifies difference and its recognition as a crucial facet of equality, and suggests that gender is a social position that cannot be abstracted.¹²⁵

This dynamic has historically pitted materialist feminists like Christine Delphy, Monique Wittig, and Nicole-Claude Mathieu, who essentially adhere to the first view, against those who represent the courant de la différence (“the difference current”), notably Antoinette Fouque, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva.¹²⁶ It has also been critical in shaping the contours of feminism through successive battles, namely the struggle for gender parity in the political arena, academia, and the media, which took place between 1992 and 2000. As Lépinard argues, parity activists “had to zigzag strategically between different meanings of difference and equality to make their claims compatible with the Republic’s core doctrines and therefore acceptable to power holders.”¹²⁷

The unresolved tension between a conception of “gender as sameness” and “gender as difference” is among the key reasons why second wave feminism has, until recently, been relatively impervious to postcolonial themes in France.¹²⁸ Together with other factors – namely the delayed development of postcolonial and feminist studies in French academia – this continuing disagreement has thwarted the large-scale incorporation of issues of race and colonialism into the feminist discourse. This is in part because, whatever their differences, both the materialist approach and the courant de la différence overwhelmingly emphasize the “singular difference of sex,” to the exclusion of other relations of power, including class, race, or sexuality.¹²⁹

However, contemporary debates over (mainly Islamic) religious signs have brought these issues to the forefront. As we will see, colonial dynamics critically inform the contestations that have taken place among pro- and anti-restriction feminists, with important implications for the ways that activists envision the boundaries of feminism and French nationhood.

Like its counterparts elsewhere, France’s pro-restriction feminist movement is composed of a “constellation”¹³⁰ of individuals and organizations that diverge in their relationships to key axes of difference, including national citizenship, ethnicity, and religious background. A first group consists of predominantly white second-wave feminists, whose actions in the 1960s and 1970s focused on access to employment, abortion rights, and combatting violence against women. Over the last several decades, many of these activists have become vocal spokespersons for state-led campaigns to curtail the visibility of Islam in the public sphere.131 In the process, organizations that once viewed republicanism as an inherently sexist doctrine have mobilized republican themes to claim that the headscarf, niqab, and burqa violate the gender ideals of French nationhood.¹³²

In articulating this “republican” opposition to veiling, pro-restriction feminists have sought the support of “authentic insiders”:¹³³ that is, women of Arab-Muslim background who publicly condemn Islamic religious practices, attracting much media attention and political acclaim in the process. Because they are deemed to have unique insight into Muslim culture, these “insiders” help to sustain an image of the “Western woman” as the sole bearer of women’s emancipation. By refusing the veil, moreover, they also serve as role models for “good Muslims,” that is, “unveiled, enlightened Muslim women like themselves and secular, gentle Arab men who accompany them.”¹³⁴

Jeanette Bougrab is among the figures to embody the role of “authentic insider” in the feminist contestations around the French face veil debate. A lawyer of Harki¹³⁵ Algerian background, she gained notoriety for her 2013 book, Ma République se meurt (My republic dies), in which she laments what she regards as Muslim women’s forced conformity to “antiquated” religious practices that limit their freedom to occupy the public space in France. During a launch hosted by the pro-restriction organization Regards de femmes (Women’s Outlooks) in April 2013, a spokesperson for the group introduced Bougrab as the “illustration, the symbol even, of the struggle to defend freedom, equality, and secularism.” By combining a consciousness of her own Islamic heritage with a refusal to submit to its “sexist” religious practices, the speaker maintained, Bougrab is both “Orient and Occident.”¹³⁶

Another Arab-Muslim feminist figure whose condemnation of the face veil has been incorporated into the pro-restriction feminist narrative is Sihem Habchi. Born in Algeria, Habchi moved as a child to Paris, and there developed a passionate dislike of traditional Islam and its treatment of women. Habchi became best known in French politics for her work as president of Ni putes, ni soumises (Neither Whores, Nor Submissive, NPNS), one of the first feminist groups to hinge its opposition to Muslim head and facial coverings on an idealized image of republican laïcité. NPNS came into being in 2002, when its founder Fadela Amara organized a demonstration for women demanding equality and an end to violence in immigrant neighbourhoods. At the time of its emergence, the movement centred on the story of Sohane, a young Arab woman who was burned alive by her boyfriend in the Parisian suburb of Virty sur Seine. The NPNS campaign portrayed this act as caused by the growing religious fanaticism of Muslim elements in France.137

In the script deployed by Habchi and her colleagues at NPNS, gender equality is a cornerstone of republicanism. Vividly recounting her personal memories and struggles, Habchi’s 2013 book, Toutes libres! (All women free!), portrays republicanism as the birthplace of modern feminism. In one particularly poignant passage, she recalls being photographed along with thirteen other women of minority ethnic origins in a ceremony commemorating the iconic female republican figure, Marianne. Following a description of the day’s events, which included a heartfelt tribute to republicanism by the president of the National Assembly, Nicolas Sarkozy, Habchi proclaims: “I am, and we are, the Republic.”¹³⁸

While they occupy different positions in the French feminist field, pro-restriction feminists in France have converged around a commitment to rooting out the face veil as a threat to women’s equality, dignity, and agency. As I will show in chapter 4, the eagerness with which pro-ban politicians in France utilized this frame to validate their own antiveiling positions demonstrates the extent to which pro-restriction feminists have gained access to the “precincts of power.”¹³⁹ It further serves to show how their framing of the face veil influenced hegemonic discourses in the legislative arena of French politics.

Like its pro-restriction counterpart, France’s anti-restriction feminist movement includes an array of individuals and organizations. A first group consists of activists of Arab-Muslim origin who, whether or not they themselves wear the headscarf, niqab, or burqa, believe that these garments deserve protection under French law. This contingent includes the Mouvement des indigènes de la République (Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic, MIR), whose Algerian-born spokesperson and co-founder, Houria Bouteldja, has led a militant campaign to expose what she regards as the racist, colonial underpinnings of French republican culture. The group’s 2005 manifesto called for a “decolonization of the Republic.” Charging that “republican equality is a myth,” it further demanded that France engage in a “radical and critical reflection on its colonial past-present.”¹⁴⁰ These demands hinged on claims that, in refusing to grant full and equal rights to Muslims, the French state was effectively carving an internal national boundary between ethnically French citizens and “foreign” – even if French-born – others.141

A small number of second wave feminists share this anti-colonial stance. For example, the sociologist, activist, and documentary filmmaker, Sylvie Tissot, has challenged attempts to disparage Islamic veiling as “anti-feminist” through her involvement in the Collectif des feministes pour l’égalité (Collective of Feminists for Equality, CFPE), a Paris-based organization that brings together Muslim and non-Muslim feminists who dispute measures to prohibit religious signs in the public sphere. Likewise, Christine Delphy, an established French feminist activist and author, has taken aim at the exclusionary foundations of restrictive laws through numerous written critiques, some of which appear in the journal Nouvelles Questions Féministes (New feminist questions), which she co-founded with Simone de Beauvoir in 1981.¹⁴²

Anti-restriction feminists claim that their opponents subscribe to a colonial belief system in denying Muslim women an equal voice in French feminist politics. Describing this dynamic, Ismahane Chouder, who appeared before the Gerin commission as president of the Collectif des féministes pour l’égalité (Collective of Feminists for Equality, CFPE), told me in our interview: “There is a colonial way of thinking here. It is unavoidable, because we see that our feminist elders, thankfully not all, when they address us, it is always to say: ‘it is we who will show you how to emancipate.’ In other words, ‘it is we who hold the tools of your liberation.’ This approach is stunningly infantilizing and it reproduces the notion that the Western woman is the sole owner of the model of emancipation for all women in the world.”¹⁴³ By attributing patronizing motivations to attempts to “liberate” veiled women, this statement echoes postcolonial scholars’ assertions that the universalizing claims of “Western” feminists presuppose the subjugation of “non-Western” feminisms.¹⁴⁴

This subjugation is further accomplished through acts of hostility toward anti-restriction feminists and their exclusion from the larger French feminist movement. In our interview, for instance, Christine Delphy recalled the sense of rejection she experienced at the hands of her former feminist colleagues when she publicly opposed the 2004 ban of religious signs in schools. During a particularly charged encounter, she explained, “these women I had known for forty years walked right past without looking at me. They cut me dead.”¹⁴⁵ Such hostile interactions, Ndella Paye further claimed, appear to serve prorestriction feminists’ desire to delegitimize competing articulations of women’s rights. In her words: “Established feminists responded to us with real violence [in 2004]. I remember that at different demonstrations and in the march for women’s rights, they prevented us from speaking. They asked us: ‘are you really feminists?’ I do not understand feminists who work against other women. I do not understand what they mean by ‘feminist.’”146 This statement underscores the perception that hostility – enacted through a symbolic violence – serves as a mechanism by which pro-restriction feminists enforce a discursive opposition between “political Islam” and “Western liberal democracy.”¹⁴⁷

My interviews with anti-restriction feminists suggest that strategic imperatives tied to a desire for resonance in the French religious signs debate have made them reluctant to frame restrictive laws in primarily anti-colonial terms. The essayist and activist Pierre Tévanian described this reluctance in our interview, tying it to the difficulties he and others faced when trying to challenge the 2004 law on religious signs in schools. In his words: “We were working in an atmosphere in which the key goal was to score points and convince people … For these reasons, we absolutely took at face value the secular and feminist assertions of our interlocutors. We would say things like, ‘yes, but as a feminist, does it not bother you that girls [wearing the headscarf] will be excluded?’ Or ‘you talk about secularism, but you don’t cite the legal definition of secularism,’ etc. The arguments in our texts were extremely well constructed to demonstrate the facts.”¹⁴⁸ This statement suggests that a desire to “demonstrate the facts” and “convince” the public of the illegitimacy of religious restrictions has driven anti-restriction feminists to focus on deploying a “legal definition of secularism” to invalidate such restrictions. Thus, Tévanian further explained, “although racism was always at issue, it was not immediately present in the debate. It was in the background. At most, we talked about exclusion, or the fact that the law would produce exclusion.”¹⁴⁹

The religious signs debate has thus brought about a new chapter in the French feminist struggle over what constitutes gender (in)equality, women’s agency, and patriarchy. As in the debate between materialist feminists and those associated with the courant de la différence, this is a struggle for legitimacy, in which both sides claim the right to represent the feminist movement. Like the concurrent party political battle, it is also a struggle over boundaries, as pro- and anti-restriction feminists envision different ways of defining the contours of feminism and the feminist movement. In doing so, they interpret and articulate the meanings of extant republican ideals and legal frameworks in competing ways.

THE 2009 GERIN COMMISSION AND 2010 FACE VEIL BAN

So far, I have described how politicians and feminist activists strategically utilize the ideas and institutions inscribed in republicanism to proffer distinct understandings of Muslims’ rights and belonging to the French nation. Regarding politicians, I argued that, in seeking to deflect the electoral threat posed by a shared political enemy – the Front National – the centre-right UMP and left-wing Socialists coalesced around an increasingly restrictive response to Islamic veiling. In this section, I consider how this jockeying for power in turn shaped politicians’ positions in the 2009–10 face veil debate. I focus on the Gerin commission, the six-month government inquiry that preceded the 2010 law prohibiting facial coverings in public space.

The Gerin commission came into being following an incident in 2008, in which France’s UMP president, Nicolas Sarkozy, denied citizenship to a French resident of Moroccan origin, on the basis that her wearing of the face veil signalled a “radical” practice of Islam. When reporting on this incident ignited a national debate over whether to legally ban this practice on the French territory, André Gerin, a Communist Party member of the National Assembly and mayor of Venissieux (a heavily immigrant suburb of Lyon), wrote an open letter to the prime minister, François Fillon, demanding government action. On 19 June 2009, fifty-eight members of the National Assembly ratified Gerin’s proposal to launch a government inquiry into the face veil.150

Between June 2009 and January 2010, Gerin and thirty-one other members of the French National Assembly heard testimony from seventy-eight invited guests representing various organizations and social groups. The commission’s 200-page report, which it submitted to the National Assembly in January 2010, outlined the moral and philosophical bases for condemning the face veil, a practice that it also proposed to tackle through restricted immigration policies. It also offered a series of recommendations, including: banning the face veil in public spaces; civic instruction as part of the integration contract for newcomers; inclusion of “the equality of men and women” among the values to be recognized by persons applying for a visa de long séjour (“long-stay visa”) or family reunification; and refusal of residency cards to persons manifesting a “radical” practice of their religion.151

The Gerin commission was instrumental to the introduction in parliament of a bill to prohibit the “dissimulation of the face in public space.” However, its proposals drew significant opposition from Socialists, a large majority of whom abstained from the National Assembly vote to pass this law. That abstention was motivated in part by a concern that the UMP was attempting to gain votes by strategically framing the face veil as a threat to national identity. This concern arose when, in November 2009, President Sarkozy launched a countrywide debate on “national identity,” in which the purported threat of the niqab and burqa featured prominently. In introducing this debate, Sarkozy asserted that, in France, “there is no room for the burqa … there is no room for women’s servitude, under any pretext, in any condition, or in any circumstance.”¹⁵² From the perspective of Socialist member Jean Glavany, the link thus drawn by Sarkozy between rejection of the burqa and the defence of French national identity produced an unacceptable image of immigrants as “suspect” or “dangerous.”¹⁵³

The Socialists’ additional decision to boycott the Gerin commission’s final vote also stemmed from anger toward Jean-François Copé, then a prominent UMP representative, for announcing his party’s plan to legally ban the face veil even before the commission had finished deliberating.¹⁵⁴ In an article published by the newspaper Figaro in December 2009, Copé claimed ownership of this issue for the UMP by outlining the conclusions of a working group on the face veil sponsored by his party. “For six months,” he wrote, “deputies in the UMP group questioned experts of various persuasions, including representatives of the Muslim community.” Copé then explained that the UMP’s position, which was to endorse a law to prohibit face coverings, stems from the party’s “attachment to republican values.”¹⁵⁵

Despite their strong support for a ban, six UMP members voted against this recommendation in the context of the Gerin commission. They did so in protest against a proposal that would make a ban contingent on the advice of the Conseil d’État, voting “no” out of a concern that the Court would reject the law. This concern turned out to be well founded. In light of the commission’s failure to present a unanimous front in favour of a ban, France’s UMP-led National Assembly called on the Conseil d’État to render its opinion on the matter. In its consultative ruling released in March 2010, the Court maintained that a general ban would constitute a breach of non-discrimination and other fundamental rights, including the right to religious expression. Although limitations on these rights can in some cases be justified, the Court stated, the public order justification put forward by the Gerin report was found not to have any precedent in the French legal system. However, the Conseil d’État gave some hope to the pro-ban camp when it stated that it could conceive of a “partial” ban applicable to particular spaces and institutions in which covering one’s face poses a security threat.156

Armed with this partial endorsement, the UMP pushed ahead with the face veil ban, making it a key promise of its campaign in the regional elections of March 2010. After those elections – in which the UMP claimed only 36 per cent of ballots, losing to the Socialist Party in all regions except Alsace¹⁵⁷ – the party brought a bill to the National Assembly that would prohibit “dissimulation of the face in public space.” Even though the principles of equality, dignity, and laïcité had been resoundingly rejected by legal experts as insufficient bases for a complete ban, these appeared front and centre in Bill 2283, which identified veiling as “incompatible with the essential values of the French secular, democratic and social Republic, as with our social project, which rests on equal dignity.”¹⁵⁸ In the vote registered on 13 July 2010, all but one of the 336 voting deputies in the National Assembly approved the bill. With the vast majority of left parliamentarians abstaining, including most Socialists,¹⁵⁹ the bill was subsequently approved by the Senate and came into effect in April 2011.

Although the Conseil d’État advised against a general ban of facial coverings in French public space, the 2010 law has since received the approval of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In a case put before the Court in April 2011, the claimant – whose initials are S.A.S. – argued that the law contravenes article 8 (the right to respect for private and family life), article 9 (the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion), article 10 (the right to freedom of expression), article 11 (the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association) and article 14 (the right to non-discrimination) of the European convention. The Court’s initial report on the case heavily cited the Gerin report, indicating that the justifications provided in this document – and not just the actual law itself – would factor into its eventual decision. The Court also took into account the advice of European bodies, including the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly on Islam, Islamism, and Islamophobia in Europe and the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, both of which opposed the general ban.160 In its final decision, in 2014, the ECHR rejected the claimant’s assertion that the 2010 law violates her fundamental rights, stating that “the barrier raised against others by a veil concealing the face in public could undermine the notion of ‘living together.’”¹⁶¹

Representations of the 2010 law as the result of an “established consensus” among French legislators contributed significantly to this judgment.¹⁶² Adrian’s 2016 analysis of recent ECHR decisions aptly demonstrates that, in adjudicating matters of religious freedom, the Court has increasingly deferred to state governments’ subjective interpretations of their countries’ secular policies and histories. For example, in two cases – Refah Partisi v. Turkey (2001) and Sahin v. Turkey (2005) – the Court gave a wide margin of appreciation to the Turkish state, allowing it to place limits on the right to religious freedom based on the then government’s secular mandate.¹⁶³ A similar margin was granted to the French state in S.A.S. v. France. Despite expressing concerns that the 2010 law violated women’s religious freedom, the Court accepted “the French government’s claim that concealing the face makes living together more difficult.”¹⁶⁴

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I analyzed party political and feminist articulations of republicanism – and laïcité – in the context of debates around immigrant (mainly Muslim) religious signs in France. Placing electoral politics at the centre of this analysis helped to reveal the extent to which the meanings attached to republican laïcité are contingent upon parties’ strategic manipulation of this discourse for political gain. For reasons tied to positioning themselves against the ultra-right, France’s two main traditional parties – the UMP and the Socialists – have converged around a program to target certain Islamic dress in the public sphere. This restrictive articulation of secularism has taken hold despite institutional mechanisms – mainly the 1905 law – which in theory guarantee individuals’ religious freedom.

Two historical junctures were especially critical in producing this outcome. Coinciding with external events that sparked widespread fear of “radical” Islam, the 1989 “headscarf affair” brought the issue of Muslim religious covering to the forefront of French national politics. Highly mediatized portrayals of schoolgirls in headscarves aggravated a growing popular concern – encouraged by the Front National – that Islamic fundamentalism was gaining ground in the banlieus (suburbs) of France’s largest cities. When the governing Socialists failed to take a hard stance on the issue, instead handing it over to the Conseil d’État, the party paid a hefty political price, gaining the reputation of being “lax” when it comes to protecting laïcité.

A second defining moment was the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy, first as minister of the interior (2002–04 and 2005–07) and later as president (2007–12). Like others in the UMP, Sarkozy was concerned that the Front National was winning over right-wing voters, particularly after the party’s leader Jean-Marie Le Pen advanced to the second round of the 2002 presidential elections. In response, he sought to galvanize potential voters around a republican discourse that anchors laïcité in a decidedly Catholic conception of French nationhood.

These two events put pressure on leftist parties to engage in a kind of “nationalist one-upmanship”165 by adopting an equally restrictive discourse of laïcité. As I will show in chapter 4, politicians and activists on the left have responded by shoring up the progressive roots of republican secularism, in part by relating it to other left-wing political projects, like strengthening the power of the state and bolstering the protection of universal rights. However, these efforts to construct a progressive secular project have not ultimately prevented left-wing politicians from portraying “radical” Islam as a threat to French republicanism. To the contrary, I will demonstrate that many leftists have employed the image of a strong state to justify narrowing the boundaries of inclusion in French nationhood.

The fact that French politics has been structured along a class-based axis of competition from the postwar period to the 2017 election has contributed to the ability of both traditional parties to portray their restrictive approach to religious signs as based in consensus. Because their political brands have historically emphasized diverging stances on the economy – rather than nationalism and identity – the Socialist and UMP parties have had some leeway in articulating the meanings of laïcité in ways that serve their shared electoral interests. As I’ll show in the next chapter, this has not been the case in Quebec, where parties’ electoral positioning is primarily defined by their positions on the “national question.”