What do I want to achieve in this essay? To make it as clear as possible, let me begin with a commentary on its title.1 First, the fact that I use the French word “laïcité” does not mean that I intend to discuss purely national issues in a parochial manner. On the contrary, I believe that French national issues do have a general relevance and import. But I also believe that this general character of the problems concerning relationships between religion and state, religion and society, religion and politics, religion and ethics, that we imagine to be associated with the notions of laïcité and secularism, can only be addressed and discussed in a proper manner from a comparative point of view, through the critical examination of singular histories and languages. This is what I have in mind when attempting a discourse which, spoken and then written in today’s transnational or cosmopolitan English, will maintain the word “laïcité” in “national” French, as consistently as possible, drawing its main references, accordingly, from the French case.
There are many intellectual risks involved here, not least to surreptitiously produce a reiteration of a narrow Francocentric understanding of the problem—not to say a typically French illusion of universality—while pretending to be critical and self-critical. I am aware of this risk, and, in a sense, it is precisely why I insist on the specificity of my references: I expect objections and critiques, which will help me relativize my point of view, in the sense of a national historical location. This is, I submit, the only way to avoid the twin illusions of abstract universality and narcissistic exceptionalism.
I use such terms on purpose, because, as readers will notice, my reflection is haunted by the twin problems of universality and universalism on the one hand, exception and exceptionalism on the other hand. As for universality, this comes from the fact that “laïcité,” spoken in French (a French that is framed and inhabited by the legacy of the complete set of Western, Euro-Mediterranean politico-theological notions, however) illustrates and touches the very heart of what we might call the intrinsic paradox of universalism, namely the fact that universal principles, values, and truth contents, while removing the limits of particularism (specific memberships and cultures, etc.), are always of necessity formulated and enunciated in a given time at a given place, and above all in a given idiom. 2 This does not destroy universality as such, but right away inscribes in its heart a contradiction or a tension, a dialectics of limitation and expansion, negation and affirmation, institution and transgression, which can never become stabilized and reach an end.3 In particular, the institutions (political, in the broad sense) which claim to incarnate universality in history—including the one that in our post-Latin languages has been named universitas or “university”—are bound to be consumed by this tension, which is also one of the reasons why they become powerfully sanctified in legal practice and the collective imaginary. As for exception and exceptionalism, the difficulty comes from the fact, particularly illustrated in the French case, that we have to do here with a double determination (at least): a singular history of relationships and conflicts between politics and religion, more precisely between Church and State, which has completely dominated the imaginary of the “common” and the representations of “authority”; and a long and prominent role of European nations and nationhood in the Western appropriation of the world, with its inextricably mixed progressive and regressive effects, combining hyperbolic ambitions and never-ending resentments, which gives a messianic or quasi-messianic character to the nation and everything that becomes closely associated with it and “intrinsic” to its typical common culture. This is eminently the case for the idea of laïcité. What I want to suggest, in short, and before entering into more specific discussions, is that in the French “case” (as in others, each in its way), the propensity to claim exceptionalism, and also the desire of others to applaud or deride this propensity, to a large extent come from the fact that the paradoxes of universality and the conflicts between different claims of universality, have become an object of public discourse itself, almost an obsession. And laïcité, inside and outside France, is one of the proper names of this obsession. This makes its genealogy and a structural analysis of its social and political functions, and an understanding of its limits, transformations and crises, all the more necessary and perilous.
Ideally, a critical discussion of laïcité in the past, the present, and the future would involve a twofold cross-examination. It should involve a relativization of the terminology itself, being compared with other terms such as secularization, but also enlightenment, tolerance, pluralism, civility or civilization, etc., each expressing a point of view on the institution of the political with respect to the religious environment, highlighting one of its aspects and reflecting a specific history. The list of alternative terms is open; it is not even sufficiently indicative, because it would be necessary to turn to the different national and cultural idioms and install a multilinguistic confrontation, beyond the limits of Western “universalistic” languages themselves. This is or will become increasingly part of the problem in the years to come.
The discussion should also involve a confrontation between typical forms of the crisis and transformations that the theologico-political complex is undergoing everywhere in the world today: Israel is attempting to build a “secular” (or modern) state based on the religious identity of its dominant community; the United States has its “manifest destiny” challenged from outside and from inside, but also sees a new wave of politicization of the faith (in particular Protestant Evangelical revivalism); Algeria suffers a lethal conflict between religious fundamentalism and military secularism, which perhaps expresses only part of the crisis of the so-called Arab-Islamic identity; Iran oscillates between moments of forced westernization and moments of “religious revolution” combining anti-imperialism and clericalism; the Indian subcontinent combines a violent conflict of monotheistic and polytheistic cultures with a specific crisis of “national secularism”; Europe as such witnesses a renewal of the idea of the “Christian roots” of its cultural identity because of the postcolonial confrontation with Islam but also the divergent ways of instituting the relationship between church and state in its different “nations” (which to a large extent became autonomous entities in the premodern era around the solution that was found for this issue, deemed the “Westphalian compromise,” each becoming in a sense an “exception” to an absent rule).4
Clearly the study of laïcité in the French variety is only a very partial, one-sided point of view on the multifaceted theologico-political complex which, to the great surprise of many, becomes (again) a key issue of our present, globalized history. The paradox and the challenge that we address in conferences prompted by the anniversary of the establishment of laïcité in France, I believe, lies in the fact that we are fully aware of this narrow limitation, while trying to formulate a general set of questions, through the critical discussion of this case, and the deconstruction of its presentation as a “model.”5
Let me now indicate the order in which I shall examine the problems of laïcité, and foretell some of my hypotheses. This is not a deduction, only a juxtaposition, highlighting different sides of the question. In the first part, I will address what I have just called the “theologico-political complex,” and I will present the hypothesis that, in French modern history, i.e., after the revolutionary reconstruction of the nation-state, whose core is a certain legal and symbolic definition of the universalistic citizen, the representation of the community and the attachment of the individual to the community have been negatively determined by the failed attempt at building a “civic religion” on a Rousseauist model.6 So the ghost of Rousseau, the greatest French philosopher between Descartes and Comte—although he was not “French” himself, or perhaps just for that reason—was permanently haunting the French political machine, especially through his way of constructing the relationship between the law and the principle of equality. And laïcité in a sense is a real, historical substitute for this imaginary construction, which means at the same time achieving some of its goals and reversing its logic. In the second part, I will move to a more sociological point of view, trying to give some indications (i.e., again, formulating hypotheses) concerning the hegemonic function of laïcité in modern French history. The category of “hegemony,” as you can imagine, has a Marxist background here: more precisely, it derives from Gramsci—who paid a keen attention himself to the French post-revolutionary history, comparing it with other European cases: the Italian Risorgimento, the German Kulturkampf, etc.7 Therefore it deals with a certain institutional form of the reproduction of class domination, which does not rest on absolute political rule, but rather on a certain equilibrium of forces, and it involves the development of cultural and ideological forms which we may also call a discourse. However, to this broad idea of laïcité as a “bourgeois,” therefore also “liberal,” hegemonic public discourse, which provides a certain “language of politics” for the bourgeois state, I will add some other dimensions, in order to be able to explain—or simply discuss—the current manifestations of the crisis of this hegemonic model, probably irreversible, which is more acute because it is so deeply entrenched in the articulation of the state and the civil society. Finally, I hope to return to the philosophical side of the problem of laïcité, albeit always from the same historical perspective. I will argue that laïcité has—or, I should say, it has had, but this past not only weighs upon the present, it also prescribes tasks, and it opens a question for the future—a very contradictory relation to what historians of ideas and culture, but also sociologists, after Weber, have described as the continuous movement of the “secularization” of politics and society in the West. To describe laïcité as a simple expression or a particular institutional realization of this movement is misleading; it misses the contradiction and the tension involved here.
What seems to me to characterize the trajectory of laïcité, not as a destiny that would have been predictable in advance, but as an aleatory result of practices, compromises, inventions, displacements, is the contradictory fact that it can be considered in a sense a regression with respect to secularization, expressing a resistance to the “neutralization” of the religious element, while on the other hand it pushes it far beyond mere neutralization (or privatization), to embody a certain critical or skeptical aperture of the relationship between faith and reason, or belief and knowledge. On the one side, therefore, you have what I will dare to describe as the “monotheistic” (rather than sacred, or pious) character of laïcité, something that is easily perceived from outside France (only the French themselves have difficulty admitting it…), but which is also difficult to precisely interpret. On the other side, you have what I consider to be the permanent legacy of the Enlightenment—or perhaps we should say rather, again in French: les Lumières—in the history of laïcité as a spiritual and philosophical framework. But we also have the very problematic adaptation of this legacy to completely new conditions and forms of belief and knowledge, which derive in particular from the new global hegemony of communication processes and media.
On the background of this triple discussion, I suggest that my title should become reversed: namely, we should not only reflect on the future of laïcité, but we should also reflect on the (contingent and hypothetic) laïcité of the future. And beyond that: not only on the laïcité of the future, but also on the religious and the religions of the future, with which laïcité maintains such an ambivalent relation of internal opposition, involving both distance and iteration.
THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL COMPLEX, NATION AS “COMMUNITY OF CITIZENS,” AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF “CIVIC RELIGION”
This is my first point—Rousseau is constantly behind us, but also ahead of us, as he was behind the revolutionaries and ahead of them: continuously revived, read otherwise, and criticized each time a restoration or a renovation of the republican form of the state was on the agenda during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was the case several times, as we know. But Rousseau ought not to be the only reference. Contemporary scholars have initiated an original use of the work of Kantorowicz to interpret the process of secularization or laicisation of politics in what might appear at first as a paradoxical manner: since the famous scheme of the sovereign’s dual nature in medieval and classical Europe, apparently concerns just the opposite, a persistent anchorage of the political in the realm of the sacred.8 The problem here would be: what happens to the “two bodies” when the sovereign is no longer a real person, or an individual, but an ideal and practical community, i.e., a polity or citizenry. It would seem that this community must become duplicated itself, in order to allow for a transcendent foundation of its unity. This was more or less, we may remember, Marx’s vision of bourgeois politics, especially in its French version (but he considered it “typical”): it worked as a “projection” of the actual divisions of the civil society into the “heavens” of the national unity, without which there would be no “body politics” (Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1844).9 But in Rousseau we find a different conceptualization, which does not operate at the level of transcendence: on the contrary, it operates in the horizon of immanence, forming an internal, and practical, relationship of the community with (and within) itself, with its own members. This is what Rousseau in the Social Contract defined as a “double rapport” (a twofold or double relation), which from one point of view regards the legislative function of the citizen, his (rather than her…) forming an “indivisible” part of the Sovereign, or the Nation expressing its perfect unity in the General Will (but also creating this unity through the General Will, which acts as causa sui); whereas from the opposite point of view it concerns the differential belonging of the citizen—qua “subject”—to what Rousseau (only then) calls l’Etat (the “state”): in this sense we would rather say today la société, since it is on this side that individual citizens emerge with their particular interests which, whatever their nature, can become the basis for the formation of “parties,” claiming to represent their particularity in the realm of politics.10 The key idea is that the Law is not transcendent, it is immanent to the community of the citizens, and the citizens have a double relation to it: collectively but also ideally, they make it, thus transforming themselves into a unitary or indivisible (“mystic”) body; individually—singulatim, as Foucault would write—they are subjected to it, and it regulates their activities from outside.11 As we also know, there is a normative, even a coercive character of this representation, not to say a “terrorist” one—which is what the counterrevolutionary rhetoric has continuously sustained.12
Now there is no doubt that what allows Rousseau (and the whole democratic and republican tradition after him) to hold this idea of an immanent process of unification and construction of the Sovereign People as a community of its own citizens, is his very strong concept of equality, or equal liberty.13 And, in fact, Rousseau’s notion of equality is just as twofold, or double-sided, as his notion of the citizen/subject itself: it is equality in the making of the law, “constituent power,” or equal participation in the legislative function (even if through representatives—and we know that this posed a serious problem of “losing” equality, the reason Rousseau tended to reject it in favor of “direct democracy”), and it is equality in the obedience to the law, equal treatment of individuals, groups, interests, social responsibilities, by the law to which they are subjected (with equally well-known difficulties, as soon as the social differences also involve relations of power, which is inevitable with property, but also with education, culture, etc.). We retrieve these two sides of the law and their common foundation on the equality of citizens in famous passages of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen from 1789.14
Now my argument is the following: in the broad sense, as a “block” or a “system” of constitutional measures—ranging from the separation of Church and State in 1905 to the complete secularization of administrations, particularly the administration of Justice, and the establishment of a public, and (at least ideally) unitary school system, which would closely associate the development of rational knowledge, the teaching of morality, and the impregnation of the individual with patriotic values and legal principles—laïcité in Modern French history is nothing but the political ideal of a community of citizens that is not transcendent, governed from the inside in an immanent manner by the rule of equality. The creation of such a community, as Rousseau perfectly understood, would have required the emergence, and therefore the invention, of a civic religion: not in the sense of a sacralization or deification of the State, or more abstract political entities, but in the sense of an absolute, unconditional primacy of the value of equality, the mutual recognition of citizens as equals, over their divergent interests and relations of power. And it is the practical impossibility to create such a civic religion, despite repeated attempts (of which the morale laïque, to which I will return, with the active support of the school system, was a privileged and strikingly contradictory example), that may allow us to understand the much more complicated pattern that actual, historical (“really existing”) laïcité in fact has taken in France. Tocqueville’s testimony (in Democracy in America, vol. 1, 1835) is crucial here, because it shows that the only form in which a “civic (or civil) religion” can exist as a “religion of equality,” is precisely one that cannot exist in France, but only in a “new nation” like the United States of America, where the relationship between religion, State, and society, reflects a totally different history (more “individualistic,” but also more “communitarian”…).15
On one side we will observe the return of the sacred within the secular or the political discourse—or to put it à la Kantorowicz, the imaginary projection of a transcendent community, mainly in the form of the sacralization of the Nation as a quasi-divine, trans-historical entity (sometimes more “racial” or exclusive, sometimes more “cultural” or inclusive, but in practice always both), for which the citizens ought to sacrifice their lives: pro patria mori as a substitute for the “indivisible” participation in the collective sovereignty—especially activated in times of war.16 And on the other side, what has been described as the final result of the century-long struggles between Church and State, nationalism and socialism, counterrevolutionary clericalism and liberal political ideologies—some rooted in the emancipation of discriminated religious communities (like the Protestants and the Jews), some rooted in the republican and democratic turn of the dominant Catholicism itself, others in the discourse of the positivist or rationalist sections of the bourgeoisie—namely a compromise (although an unstable one) between the religious and antireligious forces of society regulated by the state (what historian and sociologist Jean Baubérot calls le pacte laïque).17 This is a typical product of “organic liberalism,” as it was theorized between Guizot and Durkheim, half way between a state-controlled regime of cults (a “concordat” in the Napoleonic sense, whose memory is still haunting government policies toward Islam in today’s France), and a more or less inclusive self-regulated form of religious autonomy of the civil society, usually referred to in the English speaking world as “toleration” in the Lockean tradition.18
Allow me to add four remarks on this interpretation of the genealogy of laïcité in terms of a failed attempt at establishing a “civic religion” in the Rousseauist sense, which means that it will remain permanently haunted by its ideal model, and that it practically works on completely opposite bases: not exactly civic, but national and social, or civic only inasmuch as the citoyen is a national subject and a social agent.
The first remarks concern the notion of laïcité as a constitutional principle, whose importance has been repeatedly emphasized in recent debates.19 As I already mentioned, it was only rather late, in the 1946 Constitution, that the principle was enunciated as such: “La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale,” (France is an indivisible, secular, democratic, and social Republic) a formulation clearly determined by the fact that the French were reestablishing a Republican order after the tragic episode of the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime, which had all but undermined these principles. But we should also remember that the Third Republic, the one that in the short time span of fifteen years passed all the great lois laïques, beginning with the creation of the public school system and ending with the compromise with the Catholic Church on the “separation,” did not have a formal Constitution.20 Leaving aside other more accidental reasons, I think that the two facts are closely associated: The Third Republic (the Republic of “les Républicains”), did not inscribe laïcité in the narrow sense in its implicit Constitution, but it progressively placed it at the core of the material Constitution, i.e., the block of political principles that must become intangible (sacred if you like) because they define the political regime, and in the end the very form of the State. But in reality, this was the completion of a much longer process, arising from the moment in which the transcendental foundation of the political community had been destroyed and rebuilt on different bases, with all the contradictory consequences that this Revolution produced over time.
Hence my second remark. I agree that laïcité should not be identified with, or reduced to the separation of Church and State, even if or precisely because the symbolic event—the one that is continuously invoked these days—coincides with an act of separation which—we ought to remember—explicitly concerns the material basis, the status of properties, or clerical assets.21 The secular character of the public administration and the legal apparatus itself existed long before: it has roots in the Roman tradition, and the autonomization of the Monarchic State power in the premodern and modern periods. On the other hand, laïcité is not a principle or a rule that only governs the relationship between two powers, or two apparatuses (the Church and the State); it is a principle that regulates the relationship of the State with the society, the standing of the State within the Society that it rules. In Foucauldian terms, we might say that it is a principle of “government.” In the middle of the evolution, the crucial turning point concerned the new representation of the national community, defined in terms of republican citizenship. And if the notion of laïcité in the French case was so closely associated with that of citoyenneté, this was perhaps, negatively, because up to then the government of society, particularly at the moral level, had been so completely performed in a religious code by the Catholic Church, which itself had a religious monopoly granted by the State (a “monopoly of legitimate belief,” so to speak); but it was above all, positively, because in a secularized society, where the state has become the sole representative of the society as a whole, mechanisms of self-regulation, self-limitation of the moral or ideological power of the State over the individuals were needed. The State should not become sacred itself. The “nation” as an ideal, a sublime body of the society, was sacralized, but not the State. Laïcité paradoxically worked as an internal limitation of the sacred, with it and against it.
Hence my third remark: in debates over the meaning of French laïcité, a recurring dilemma concerns whether its equation with neutralité refers to a neutrality or neutralization of State interventions within the realm of values, morality, religion, consciousness, or the neutralization of religious influences and memberships or forces within the public sphere (from justice to healthcare or Santé publique, and also, in the French case, the school system, or the established part of it (often referred to as l’ Ecole with capital E). This dilemma again played a great role in recent debates about the Islamic veil and the displaying of religious symbols within the educational and medical institutions. Both interpretations are relevant indeed, which is a good index of what, after other writers (such as Pierre Rosanvallon), I have called here “organic liberalism.”22 But also, clearly, there is an unstable equilibrium here, in which either the State imposes constraints on the “free” development of religious (or cultural) tendencies originating within the society, or religious and cultural movements try to modify the definition of the public sphere. As all the best historians of laïcité—Baubérot, Poulat, Lalouette, and others—have observed, laïcité does not make religion a private affair which would be confined in private or rather domestic spaces, even if this motto regularly returns in the controversies: but it prevents religion from explicitly taking part in the definition of “public values,” and for that reason it defines it as an expression of “private,” meaning particular, non-generalizable interests or convictions.23 What seems to lie behind these complicated shifts and balances is not simply a religious neutrality, it is something much more decisive: a relative or partial neutralization of politics itself, in the Schmittian sense, i.e., a delimitation of the sphere where the political conflict cannot rise to the extreme, or take the form of “two nations” existing within the “indivisible” Nation. What is at stake is, thus, the drawing of a line of demarcation between legitimate political competition and illegitimate political antagonism. At a certain point in history, this menacing possibility, which would undermine the State’s monopoly of regulating the society (“government”), was represented or represented itself as a religious divide (Catholics and Protestants), or a “civil war” between religion and antireligion.24 This has led to imposing upon “religions” a definition which makes them in the principle “apolitical,” for them not to become antipolitical. It is indeed, historically speaking, a complete abstraction, if not a denial of reality—which also explains why, when social or cultural or ideological conflicts again seem to become polarized along religious lines, the whole “constitution” is shaken. The legitimacy of power is threatened. But to be honest, there is also the possibility that a political discourse pictures a social or political antagonism as a religious conflict, in order to raise the specter of a constitutional crisis and instrumentalize it…
Finally, I would insist on the idea which will provide us with a transition to a second set of problems, namely the originary association of laïcité with a conception of citizenship based on equality as a legal and political principle, without which liberty itself could not exist, thus becoming a paradoxical characteristic of the citizen as such (transforming a relation into a predicate: the republican citizen is “the equal human,” for whom equality is part of his/her nature).25 This has also very contradictory effects. It makes discriminations, including “religious discriminations,” radically illegitimate (the problem becomes more difficult with “cultural” discriminations, or perhaps many uses of the concept “culture” are precisely meant to cover this gray zone). But it also provides the Nation (the National State, the French Republic) with a powerful instrument of social hypocrisy: The Republic and its political representatives can always tell the citizens: it is true, you don’t enjoy perfect égalité (far from it), but you have laïcité, which is its quintessential expression in the realm of individual autonomy. However, this discourse also works conversely, as a permanent incitement to claim equality: because laïcité, which has replaced to some extent the missing civic religion, teaches that equality is inalienable, that it should prevail over other values if the community is at all to survive, citizens who are explicitly or covertly discriminated against because of their religion (or the quasi racial use of their religious affiliation, e.g., Muslims) can invoke the protection of a (somewhat idealized) laïcité to fight for recognition.
BOURGEOIS HEGEMONY AND REPUBLICAN LAÏCITÉ: THE QUESTION OF POTESTAS INDIRECTA
I associated a second set of problems with the notion of bourgeois hegemony, in an enlarged Gramscian sense.26 I will skip theoretical and methodological considerations on the relationship of such a notion with the discussion of power structures, and the discussion of forms or modes of domination—only simply to admit that power structures, as Foucault has shown, are always unstable: they meet with resistances, they build on the capacity to control resistances or even to co-opt or instrumentalize them, and they are always heterogeneous, combining discursive elements and bodily elements, power in the form of knowledge and power in the form of discipline.27 Let us also admit, with Max Weber, that the ultimate measure of domination is the probability to have its injunctions obeyed, i.e., to obtain consensus, legitimacy.28 If laïcité has played such a decisive role in the progressive construction of what we may call a bourgeois hegemonic regime in France, with its astonishing capacity to survive dramatic political crises by providing antagonistic parties with a common language and cultural code, this is probably because laïcité really forms a crucial part of a bourgeois hegemony rooted in power-knowledge, in disciplines, in procedures which anticipate and reproduce a consensus prevailing over social antagonisms, while not abolishing them entirely. But isn’t it also for the very same reason that it proves so difficult to adapt to other circumstances in which neither the social problems nor the cultural horizons and codes have remained the same—especially because they are less and less defined or definable in purely national terms? After the hegemonic moment comes the crisis of hegemony, and the crisis displays aspects that mirror the construction of the hegemony itself, affecting its core principles. Allow me to illustrate this idea by considering the social question on the one hand, the centrality of the school system in the constitutional fabric of laïcité on the other hand, and their articulation.
One striking aspect of debates and investigations prompted by the anniversary of the creation of laïcité in 1905 on the background of its current uncertainties, has been a renewed insistence on the correlation between the religious question and the social question in France, and the importance this correlation had in giving the leading roles to socialist or liberal-socialist leaders (such as Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand) who pushed in the direction of an “open” laïcité that would not become equivalent with militant anticlericalism, and even less with an official atheism, but involved a recognition of religious pluralism in the society under the condition of its relative political neutralization.29 The difficult question, however, which marks the difference between laïcité and other examples of “secularization” in the Western world, concerns the extent to which the educational system was located, not on the side of the “social,” but on the side of the “political” (i.e., more than ever thought of in terms of pouvoir spirituel as Auguste Comte would say), leading to a quasi monopoly of public education (and especially of primary education), to a unified school system where nevertheless it could be argued that it is the school that “controls” the State as much as the State controls the school.30
One should never forget that the completion and systematization of laïcité comes after the Century of Revolutions in Europe, and especially in France, where there was practically one insurrection for each generation, which each time raised the spectre of communism, and provoked bloody counterrevolutionary repressions. This was once again the case with the Paris Commune (1871), but shortly after that the Républicains launched a program of social policies that anticipated the social state, if not the welfare state, and simultaneously they laid the bases of laïcité as a firm ideological foundation for the so-called pacte républicain. That these developments also corresponded to the new wave of French colonial imperialism is another aspect of the same conjuncture, undoubtedly decisive for the nationalist construction of hegemony, to which I will return shortly. It was obviously crucial that, on this occasion, a majority of the Socialist movement, under the guidance of Jaurès, rallied the consensus around laïcité, and powerfully contributed to its institution, drawing more or less the same lines of demarcation as in the Dreyfus Affair on the questions of militarism and anti-Semitism. Beyond his philosophical convictions (an interesting combination of Fichte and Marx), it is well known that Jaurès explained that laïcité had to be established in order for “the religious question” to be closed, or sealed, and “the social question” to come to the fore, and become the essential object of political debate and activity in France. In short, even if not exactly in Marxist terms, it corresponded to a project of having the real problems addressed instead of the imaginary ones. Jaurès certainly thought of the necessity of allowing workers with a Christian denomination and workers with atheist convictions to work alongside, adhere to the same unions, and vote for the same Socialist Party—thus depriving the bourgeoisie of her capacity to instrumentalize the religious divisions of the peasantry and the working class. The irony of the situation, but also probably the reason for the success of this strategy, was that the bourgeoisie in the broad sense—including capitalists and the professional class, or Noblesse d’Etat, as Pierre Bourdieu calls it—had exactly the same need of a neutralization of the religious issue, in order to invent its own “social” strategies in the class struggle.31
Today we frequently hear social activists or sociologists, who are commenting on the volatile conflicts in the new proletarian districts populated by racially discriminated and heavily exploited migrants, explain that laïcité should be a crucial principle—with the necessary historical adaptations, including an effective and full recognition of Islam as a legitimate religion in the French, and more fundamentally, in the European space. This would allow it to finally focus on the social problems which call for social and economic solutions, without diverting them and covering them with a religious veil, or fueling the class antagonism with heterogeneous religious passions.32 There is much truth, I believe, in this discourse—except that, practically, it is a circular one: the removal of the religious veil makes it possible to uncover the social questions whose clarification, in turn, would make it possible to remove or relocate the religious code in its “proper” place…This aporia reminds us of the “exceptional” but also highly ambiguous character of the hegemonic compromise that was achieved a century ago, at the time of the foundation of laïcité. It did, probably, make it possible for the working class and the Socialist movement to achieve political strength and influence, without which no social state or limitation of the degree of exploitation would have been possible in France—with such further consequences as the politics of the Front Populaire (1936–1938) producing an educational reform led by “Radical” Minister Jean Zay (a Freemason), that considerably democratized French society.33 But it also led to the fact that, at some point, Socialist and Communist parties would rise in defense of laïcité and the state monopoly of education more vigorously than any other objective. This was how they were always able to overcome their political divisions: not on the terrain of the class struggle itself, but inasmuch as they jointly participated in mass demonstrations for laïcité. My generation, I may add, has a vivid memory of that twist: in the 1970s and 1980s, meetings and journées d’action pour la défense de l’école laïque tended to replace national strikes for the defense of social rights. In the end, the constitutional instrument used to put aside religious antagonisms would become an end in itself, or the “neutralization of religion” would have replaced “religion” in its role of ideological displacement of the social question. This probably paved the way for the perverse use of laïcité as a code word for nationalist exclusion of the new “Other”: the postcolonial proletarian or immigré.
Let us now examine the other aspect of the question of hegemony that I mentioned, namely the centrality of the school and the educational program in the construction of laïcité. So much has been already said on this, and still, so much remains to be clarified! I need to be very schematic, though. There is clearly a specific political level, which is not purely French, but has equivalents above all in other European countries of dominant Catholic culture (Italy, Spain, Austria, Ireland, Poland…), coming from the fact that Catholicism was both a religion and a centralized Church, which is not the case—or not to the same extent—for other “religions,” including other (“reformed”) Christian denominations. As a religion, and a monotheistic one, it is deeply entrenched in the institutions of the patriarchal family and the education which govern the symbolic structures of alliance, genealogy, transmission of experience and knowledge, the distinction of truth and error (“orthodoxy”), individual and social morality (“orthopraxis”), endowing all of them with a sacred (or sacramental) meaning. As a visible church, which means a human institution “mixed” with the world but preparing the faithful for her “conversion,” it organizes all these processes of meaning and culture in the form of a hierarchic structure of power, which it calls itself spiritual—a term that was borrowed from ecclesiastical history by some philosophers who inspired laïcité, particularly Auguste Comte, whose first significant work, written in 1826, was called Considérations sur le pouvoir spirituel.34 Ultimately, it derived from Thomas Hobbes, who in his Leviathan from 1651 (the founding text of modern political philosophy), opposed the Catholic doctrine of potestas indirecta theorized by Cardinal Robert Bellarmin to justify a distribution of powers between the State and the Church (with the State governing the bodies and the Church governing the souls), not in order to eliminate the idea of the government of the souls, but, on the contrary, to explain that a political sovereignty of the State is possible only if the two powers are exercised in a coherent manner, by a single institution, albeit in two different modalities: “direct” and “indirect,” or legal and educational.35 It is worth recalling here, at least as a symbolic indication, that the Greek term laos, whence the French word laïcité is derived, which undoubtedly has a complex history, was originally a theological term (it meant the people of God, the community of the faithful).36 Laïcité also has this meaning: in a deep sense it stripped the laos, the community, of its intrinsic relationship with the religious institution, and transferred faith, or some of its aspects, particularly the moral aspects (what the Germans would call Gewissen, now reconciled with Wissen, or scientific knowledge), from the religious horizon to the national or political horizon. This meant that laïcité was not only a way to limit the role of religion in the public sphere, it was also a way to have secularism enter the private, the domestic sphere, to produce other forms of moralization of the private. It still is, to the extent that it remains alive—and we should notice right away that this lively character of laïcité in the French society largely relies on its implementation in the educational realm. Quite understandably, this was never possible without conflicts and compromises, as we keep witnessing today on issues of sexuality, marriage, procreation, “birth control” and abortion, euthanasia, etc. But in the period of actual hegemony, the conflicts were marginalized and the compromises reinforced the alliance of School and State against other social agencies.
Clearly, none of this was a simple phenomenon of the conjuncture, a matter of politics in the narrow sense, as it is carried on by parties, parliamentary majorities, etc. It concerned the anthropological fabric of the Nation-State, and its program of modernizing society.37 It concerned therefore the possibility, perhaps the necessity, of permanently relativizing the absolute character of cultural memberships and traditions, in order to subjugate them and, to some extent, replace them with a second-degree membership, which is the participation in the “community of the citizens,” mediated by the State, the Law, the political discourse of the “Republic.” So, it amounted, abstractly speaking, to what in other places, following indications from Hobbes, Hegel, and Weber, I have called a double process of virtual deconstruction of primary identities, and virtual reconstruction of secondary identities, which can be a very violent process in a latent manner at least. In fact, as a process of transformation, a production of the “new human” of the nation, it is always violent, but usually achieved in a “soft” and mostly invisible or imperceptible manner, through the imposition of norms and disciplines, and the intellectual formation (Bildung) of subjectivities.38
In the French case, this was tendentially achieved through the construction of a central Ideological State Apparatus (to borrow Althusser’s formulation), that associated the working of the (mainly public) educational system, and the political and social role of the family (“private” by definition). It is in their interaction that we find the core of the process of civic moralization, and conversely the reason for the permanent expression of laïcité in terms of social ethics and secular or secularized morality, for which the episode of the creation of morale laïque by the Third Republic, transforming the school teachers into secular priests (or perhaps preachers, on the Protestant model), is both typical and only partial.39 A good testimony of the importance of this combined educational and familial ideological mechanism under the aegis of the State, is the fact that, for a long period, associations de parents d’élèves (corporations of student’s parents) remained perhaps the single most important political structure of the French civil society, both supporting the political regime and constantly negotiating compromises with the State and the political parties at a national level (nothing comparable, therefore, with parents’ associations in U.S. society, which are always local). A lasting consequence, perhaps a perverse one (but this is not only a sensitive matter, it is also a difficult problem), is the fact that the school system does not easily abandon the objective of secularizing the family in order to moralize it, directly or indirectly. Without examining this background, successive episodes of the question of the “Islamic veil” (but also debates about “sexual education” and “birth-control information” for girls) in French schools are impossible to understand—leaving aside (if possible) their instrumentalization by political and religious forces.
Now, as was already the case previously, these considerations call for commentaries and qualifications. Leaving aside—which is obvious—that the reality we are picturing here in terms of hegemony is neither simple nor stable, but a more or less precarious equilibrium, with powerful countertendencies (the Catholic Church, in a sense, never gave up its own “hegemonic” project), I next discuss three complementary aspects.
One of them is a clear consequence of the fact that, laïcité not being a unanimous “civic religion” set up a priori by the General Will, or coinciding with the institution of citizenship as the Rousseauist model would imply, but a social and political compromise expressed in universalistic terms, the “spiritual power” was always shared. In particular, it was split along lines of division of the public and the private. Perhaps the most important aspect here concerns the highly contradictory effect of laïcité on the public condition of women in French modern history, and their equivocal inclusionary exclusion, or exclusionary inclusion, in the public sphere. There is little doubt that, particularly after the Front Populaire in 1936 and the Libération in 1945, educated or rather intellectual women immensely benefited from the working of the public school system which is an essential part of laïcité, as the great feminist historian Michelle Perrot and others have argued.40 Not only the “daughters of educated men” would become educated themselves, as Virginia Woolf famously wrote (in Three Guineas, echoing the protest of Mary Wollstonecraft, but also others). However, there is also little doubt that the French République laïque not only was one of the latest Western “democracies” to enfranchise women as active citizens, but it was also one where the resistances to admit women to the legislative and governmental functions (i.e., in Rousseauist terms, the participation in the “indivisible” sovereign) are strongest and most entrenched, as shown by Geneviève Fraisse and others.41 It seems impossible not to associate this fact—which, for example, explains some of the oddities of the recent debate over parité, as perceived from outside France42—with the other fact, that part of the historical compromise between Church and State (which some authors ironically called catholaïcité), was the reservation of secular morality and patriotism for men, and the long abandonment of women to the more or less complete control of their souls (convictions) and bodies (sexuality) exercised by the Church. Generally speaking, the bourgeois secular Republic tended to use the Church or the Churches (or religious bodies) as a “transmission belt” to control “minorities”: women, workers—better a Clerical influence than a Communist one—“natives” in the colonies…(whose sum total indeed makes a huge majority of the population).43
In the case of the working class, this process of exclusion from full citizenship would certainly have lasted for decades or indefinitely, if it were not for the development of class struggles and the Labour movement, which powerfully challenged it. This takes us back to the program of Jaurès, and the achievements of the Popular Front. But again we are facing a considerable ambiguity. The protracted political struggle within the “constitutional” consensus on laïcité, and the deep identification of the Republic with its educational function, which tried to expand and displace its social limits, produced a profound national conviction that the main form of social equality, i.e., the one that truly concerns the political community, is égalité des chances: equal opportunity provided to individuals by the school system. All bourgeois societies are indeed meritocratic, at least in principle.44 However, France has transformed meritocracy not only into an instrument of selection for the elites, but into a principle of national unity and cohesion. The access to the Ecole unique, and the collective promotion, over several generations, to professional recognition and middle-class standard of living—in short, upward mobility through education—has been the dream of the working class since the beginning of the Third Republic. But this dream has now collapsed, and the French working class is today further away from achieving it than it ever was, the condition of migrants being only one aspect of this general drawback (not even always the worst). This produces at the heart of the public space not only resentment, but despair. And the political consequences of despair are unpredictable…
Finally, I would like to say that, obviously, what I have described as the hegemonic functions of laïcité: a form of “organic liberalism,” a combination of school and family in a single albeit complex “ideological State apparatus” in the service of political consensus, worked only (or only in its typical form) for the national citizen. It excluded the colony, or rather it created an interstitial space of huge dimensions, located between the two boundaries which separate the national territory from the empire, and the empire from the external world (today largely reproduced or replicated in a postcolonial manner within the national territory itself).45 These are certainly no clear-cut boundaries, and the intermediary space is more than any other a space of confrontations between competing logics: this is indeed where the missionary dimension of laïcité becomes displayed. It has one foot in emancipatory aspects of modernization, particularly inasmuch as the access to the world culture is involved, and one foot in sheer racism, in its typical French guise, which imposes the test of cultural assimilation as an absolute condition for the recognition as “full” or “equal” human being. Fanon never tired of emphasizing this contradiction.46
A PARADOXICAL INSTITUTION OF THE UNIVERSAL
This leads me to a last point, which for the sake of brevity I will combine with my conclusions or final hypotheses. The relationship of laïcité with universalism, or, as I said in the beginning, the function of laïcité as a paradoxical institution of the universal, deserves a whole complex discussion: on a “local” and “singular” point of discursive enunciation, the universal becomes at the same time appropriated, therefore reversed into its opposite, and expanded, therefore carried beyond the boundaries of a specific Nation or Culture. Perhaps we could adopt here Derrida’s oxymoronic composition: the universal becomes ex-appropriated, an idea which indeed also concerns “democracy,” “scientific knowledge,” etc. In short, all the aspects of the universalistic discourses inherited from the Enlightenment. I would insist again on the violent tension that is at stake here. I see two tendencies in the history of laïcité, and I don’t believe that they can be easily isolated from one another. This is precisely where we need not only facts, or political analyses, but interpretation, and deconstruction. It is not by chance that I quoted Derrida, and his philosophical oxymoron: ex-appropriation.47 His expression also hints at a task, an intellectual action. But if we want to disentangle and separate the inseparable, we might say that laïcité combines a theological and a sceptical move.
My guiding thread here is in good part derived from the Hegelian analysis of the intimate conflict between belief or faith (Glauben) and knowledge, intellectual formation or Enlightenment (Wissen, Bildung, Aufklärung) in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which concludes with his famous description of the revolutionary Terror.48 This is an indication of how violent the conflict involved here could become, but the lesson is also that each antithetic term bears an intrinsic, internal relation to the other. They are not existing or thinkable apart from one another. So, there is an element of faith in the laïcité that has remained permanent (it was not only acknowledged but proudly vindicated by such Republican philosophers as Ferdinand Buisson, author of La foi laïque). But there is also a deep element of scepticism that continues the critical “materialist” side of the radical Enlightenment (in Jonathan Israel’s terms).49
The element of faith is clearly associated with the missionary dimension, the messianic belief in the virtues of linear progress that also, indeed, allowed it for the French nation to present itself as the beacon of civilization for the rest of the world, and proves so difficult to abandon retrospectively—just as it will prove difficult for the United States to abandon the idea that they were showing the world the way to democracy, or that democracy is a specific “American value,” when the time comes for that…I see no better possibility, in order to highlight the theological element in this belief, than to call it an additional monotheism, or one monotheism more. This is a monotheism without a personal God, to be sure, but not without persons, as illustrated in the Religion de l’Humanité proposed by the Saint-Simonians, Auguste Comte, and “utopian” socialists such as Pierre Leroux (1841). The Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, which is often allegorically represented as new Tables of the Law with a direct allusion to the Revelation of Moses, enunciates the ideal core of this additional monotheism, which indeed would not have been possible without the age-old confrontation between the secular representation of human rights and the theological doctrine of revelation. If you leave aside this discursive or ideological structure, you have difficulty understanding the forms that the rejection of Islam has taken in the French case. Because Islam also is an additional monotheism in the French cultural space, which comes “from outside,” whereas laïcité comes “from inside,” and which has multisecular history whereas laïcité is only slightly more than a century old now. But two candidates competing for a single space is difficult to handle. No wonder Islam is systematically pictured as anti-laïcité, or as the religion which “by nature,” is incompatible with laïcité, or whose introduction within the “concordat,” the “historical compromise,” or the “social contract” that is laïcité would simply destroy it (or spiritually corrupt it, by forcing it to give up its principles). And as a consequence, a sort of new war of religion is lurking, which does not simply oppose traditional religions among themselves, but two discourses of belief, across the barrier of revelation. This is what I had in mind when I said that, in a sense, laïcité was less than secular, if we admit that there is something like a “normal” form of secularization—which is problematic.
But in a different sense laïcité is perhaps more than secularization, particularly since secularization or modernization tends to adopt the form of a general equivalence of ideas, a process of communication where all discourses and the corresponding beliefs or subjectivities become relativized and, by the same token, legitimized. In laïcité there is a cultural element which has to do with the fact that belief and knowledge are both inseparable and contradictory. This would not be a problem if they belonged to separate realms: but this is not the case, even in scientific matters, perhaps above all in scientific matters, at least in the case of anthropological disciplines which touch the living, thinking, acting, and feeling subject—from biology to psychology to economics. Scientism is the ideology which insists that the domains of belief and knowledge can become radically separated institutionally and epistemologically: but precisely, in a striking illustration of the Hegelian dialectic of the reversal of truth into its opposite, scientism itself is a typical and perhaps an extreme form of modern belief or faith. This is what made it possible for Nietzsche, in a famous passage of The Gay Science (1882) to exclaim: “we are still pious” (Inwiefern auch wir noch fromm sind) (§ 344). So, a permanent critical activity of the understanding—a Cartesian and Spinozistic term that I prefer to “reason”—is needed, which tends to separate, or dislocate, the inseparable: not to keep one side and reject the other, but to make it possible to work with both in a free manner, or in a manner that is somewhat freer. This aspect of scepticism is also included in the historical experience of laïcité, and particularly in the experience of critical anthropological thinking within the Academia, whose last ambitious formulation perhaps was structuralism. I tend to associate this side of laïcité with a certain radical legacy of the Enlightenment, and I would agree with Catherine Kintzler that such names as Marquis de Condorcet are very inspirative here, perhaps combined with others: for example, it is a good exercise to read again Rousseau’s Second Discourse in order to correct the mythology of progress that Condorcet shared with many of his contemporaries, and that was so influential in spreading Western “secular” messianicism.50
In lieu of a conclusion, I simply return to my title, presenting it as a genuine question which remains open: What future for laïcité? We don’t know, but we can suspect that this future must involve a complete philosophical and political reformulation. It would exist only if something like a laïcité of the future emerges—perhaps a French “translation” of a much broader and more reciprocal, more widely equalitarian program. But in turn the laïcité of the future, if it is to emerge, would depend on hypothetic transformations of the conditions and functions of the religions as such in the world and in each region. New religions or creeds with a “religious” dimension: ecology here looks like a good candidate. Or reformed versions of the old religions, particularly the old intolerant forms of monotheism. This would also mean that the rules after which the line of demarcation between the religious and the political is drawn, or the legitimate and the illegitimate forms of combining religious values with political objectives, should be redefined. This seems to be inevitable and forms one key objective for a transnational political culture, but also clearly one of the most volatile and hazardous objects of today’s and tomorrow’s politics.