PRELIMINARY
In the summer of 2016, emotion and outrage were enormous in the wake of a murderous attack perpetrated during the festivities of 14 juillet (the French national holiday) at Nice. A lone driver, of Tunisian origin, who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (also known as Daesh), launched his truck into the crowd, killed 86 people (men, women, and children of different denominations and nationalities), and injured more than 300 others. The mass killing—by a method that has been repeated since then—came shortly after several other murders and assaults committed by Islamic terrorists or attributed to them, particularly the shooting of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists on January 7, 2015, and the massacre at and around the music hall Le Bataclan in Paris on November 13, 2015. The attacks demonstrated again how real was the threat against civilians and ordinary institutions incarnated by Islamist organizations based in the Middle East (where the French army, lest we forget, also participates in military interventions). These organizations’ emissaries are either dispatched from Syria and other training places, or are recruited through the Internet from among young French Muslims (men, occasionally women) with a more or less troubled social and psychological background, or, increasingly—as in the killings at San Bernardino and Orlando in the United States during the same period 1—they are individuals who decided to pledge “allegiance to the Islamic State”; inventing for themselves a sacred mission in the moment of their acting out.
These repeated episodes led France to declare a legal “state of emergency” which, since then, has been continuously prorogated. These incidents also encouraged racist manifestations, including aggression directed at members of the Muslim communities in French cities, especially targeting women wearing “Islamic veils” already forbidden or hardly tolerated in various public places.2 To make things worse, insistent campaigns of intellectuals, media, and politicians pictured the “multiplication” of Muslim women donning hijabs or other traditional veils as part of a strategic plan to create in France a “secessionist” community that would be controlled by Islamist activists and “Salafist imams,” which would therefore pose a threat to national unity and security. It is in this (heavy) context that, right after the Nice assaults, some mayors of towns and cities on the seaside (mainly on the Mediterranean) issued municipal decrees to ban the wearing of “burkinis” (and more generally traditional Muslim attire) on their beaches: it was a ridiculous but also violent symbolic initiative, which immediately induced some brutal scenes of expulsion or coercion that were reported worldwide, and some clashes between the local police, vigilante-type mobs, and young men of Arab origin (e.g., in Corsica).3 The initiative was acclaimed by Islamophobic groups, “secular feminists,” and “republican” politicians. Manuel Valls, the prime minister [at the time], himself supported the ban. But it was criticized by others, including two important (women) ministers in the government (Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and Marisol Touraine). For his part, French President Francois Hollande remained cautiously silent.
On August 22, 2016, a district judge—ruling against the protest of the Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (Committee against Islamophobia in France, active since 2003)—validated the bans, declaring that such “conspicuous garments” are signs of “religious fanaticism” and part of a “debasement of women” incompatible with the values of a “democratic society.” But on August 26, at the request of the same CCIF plus the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (the historic league created at the time of the Dreyfus Affair to combat anti-Semitism), the Conseil d’Etat (the highest French court in administrative matters) reversed the ruling, stating that such interdictions issued under the pressure of circumstances “contain a grave damage, manifestly illegal, against such fundamental liberties as the right to circulate, the freedom of conscience, and personal freedom in general.”4 This decision put an end to the wave of initiatives from (mostly right-wing or far-right) local authorities who sought to increase the general tension and customize the stigmatization of Muslims in the name of the defense of laïcité and “secular values” in French society—a society already torn apart by religious and racial divides, and frightened by the terrorist attacks.
However important this ruling has been (and remains) politically, it was also clear that it would only represent one episode in a protracted conflict. Prime Minister Valls immediately declared on his Facebook page that the decision did not “close the fundamental debate” over the wearing of burkinis, because the swimsuit expressed the “political project” to “create a counter-society based on the servitude of women, incompatible with the values of France and the Republic,” an attack before which it would be unthinkable to recoil.5 Other politicians announced that they would introduce a law further extending the ban on “Muslim attire” in public spaces.
On August 30, I published an article on this episode in the journal Libération, which I expanded subsequently for a collective volume on “political uses and misuses of laïcité.”6 I present here an English adaptation of this article, as a complement to my previous essay, “What Future for Laïcité?” (from 2005), to signal the transformations that are taking place in this moment.
LAÏCITÉ AS NATIONAL IDENTITY POLITICS
Thanks to the ruling of the Conseil d’Etat, we will avoid seeing in France a morality police, charged not with forcing women to wear the veil (as in some other countries), but with forcing them to remove it. The exercise of freedom—so the ruling declares—must have priority over the exigencies of public order, which by definition restrict it, as far as possible. In a democracy, the rights of women are a matter of their decision, and not of a theologico-political grid of interpretation plastered over their behavior to “force them to be free.”7 Laïcité as an institution means an obligation of neutrality of the state toward citizens and not an ideological obligation of citizens toward the state.
I consider (and I am not alone) these juridical demonstrations as fundamental. As they deliver a blow to the attempt to exploit the sentiments—anguish, anger, suspicion—aroused by the series of attacks perpetrated in the name of Islam, in order to combine a fundamentalist laïcisme with a strategy of the exacerbation of nationalism, they are going to arouse a counteroffensive. Indeed, this started the day after the ruling of the Conseil, with stunning declarations from the prime minister. Other declarations show that, independent of whether the guerilla campaign by certain mayors currently being waged against the judicial order is successful or not, more perilous in the long run will be proposals to legislate by taking new steps in prohibiting public signs of belonging to a certain religion. But the moral and political stakes therein will be very high, because it becomes clear that such legislation would not only require a constitutional revision, it signifies that we are drifting from the state of law toward the state of exception.
Just as important are the implications with regard to the conception and the institution of laïcité. But here a difficulty begins to arise, which requires some philosophical elucidation. There must be a genealogical labor on what laïcité has been in France, and what it is becoming in the present moment.8 And, on this basis, it is necessary to discuss what must be conserved, prolonged, or restored, but also reformed, so that the signification of the principle does not find itself turned into its opposite.
Historically, the idea of laïcité in France is divided between two conceptions, both issuing from the centuries-long confrontation between Catholicism and Republicanism. Régis Debray has baptized them “republican” and “democratic,” but this alternative is not satisfying in my eyes because there are democratic elements on each side, and because both belong to the republican tradition.9 Both conceptions, in fact, express aspects of the Enlightenment’s legacy. I would say that the first—ultimately derived from the Hobbesian doctrine of the government as a “representative” of the multitude, who acts in the citizens’ name and in their best interest—is rather statist and authoritarian, while the second, in part derived from the conceptions of Locke on individual self-ownership and “toleration,” is more liberal and even includes a libertarian tendency. The first makes laïcité an essential piece of the “normative” primacy of public order over private activities and opinions, whereas the second posits the autonomy of civil society, to which belong the liberties of conscience and of expression, as the “natural” order of things of which the state must be the servant and the protector. The law of separation of 1905 did not so much mark the triumph of the second over the first as a correction of anticlerical projects for “laicizing society,” by means of guarantees for individual and collective liberties. Evidently this allows it to be invoked every time the laïcité of the state is threatened in its existence, or in its democratic character, which can happen in many different manners and is probably the case today.10
Unlike some excellent interpreters (in particular Jean Baubérot, whose lucidity and erudition I admire and with whom I share many conclusions), I do not think that the “identitarian laïcité” (the program of which we see today developing on the right and the left of the political spectrum) represents a simple accentuation of the Hobbesian heritage or its revenge on the liberal interpretation, even if I can see which dogmatic arguments have favored the orchestration of a juridical, moral, and pedagogical conception of public authority, and its sliding toward the idea of an “order of values” which are baptized as republican and laïque, but are in reality nationalist and Islamophobic. I believe that something like a mutation has occurred. I find it important to try to understand its ideological content and what made it possible in the conjuncture.
Indeed, the symbolic equation which subtends identitarian laïcité must be reconstructed in its whole extension: what it posits is that the identity of the Republic (and the “community of citizens” instituted by the Republican state) resides in laïcité, and, correlatively, that laïcité must serve the assimilation of populations of foreign origin (which, put more clearly, means colonial and postcolonial), lest they are liable, by their culture and religious beliefs, to constitute a “foreign body” at the heart of the nation. Making assimilation explicitly the other name of “national” and “republican” identity, former president Nicolas Sarkozy in particular has enunciated the common element of the discourses which are now circulating from left to right and far right, thus redistributing political and ideological cleavages in a decisive manner. Of course, it can be no innocent coincidence that the notion of assimilation officially formed the ideal objective of French colonization and its “civilizing” mission.11 This element of repressed unconscious continuously insists, loudly returning to the fore in favorable circumstances like those we have nowadays.12 Being obsessed by the necessity of building a dam against “communitarianism,” this politics in fact comes to construct (by means of “values,” but also of norms and cultural prohibitions) a state communitarianism. And as always, this communitarianism involves a control on the lives of women, completely symmetrical with the control imposed on them by “traditional” structures of patriarchic power blessed by religious laws, whether “oriental” or not, but also, until recently in Europe, by the Napoleonic civil code, which deemed women to be “minors” and relegated them to the condition of “passive citizens.” The analogy is undeniable with the process that the statesman Georges Clemenceau described in 1901 as follows: “in order to suppress the religious congregation, we make France a big congregation.”13
But more serious still, above all in the current conjuncture: the symmetrical opposite or the inverse synonym of assimilation is acculturation. Now this notion (which is taken from the vocabulary of anthropology and transformed into a category for the interpretation of political and ideological history) is the very spearhead of the ideological offensive of Islamic fundamentalism which denounces the grip of (more or less completely identified) “Christian” and “secular” civilization on Muslim communities in Europe (and on “modernizing” Arab-Muslim societies). From this it draws on occasion a legitimation of “spiritual” jihad against the West, as one can read on various Internet sites.14 The construction of laïcité as collective, national identity, subtended by the idea that the republic implies assimilation (and not only integration into social life and the fulfillment of civic obligations), is thus drawn into a scenario of mimetic rivalry with the totalitarian discourse against which, at the same time, French politics pretends to guard itself. As Lacan would say: we receive our message from the Other in inverted form…The least we can say is that such a construction will serve neither for understanding the nature of the perils, nor, since “we are at war,” for forging solidarity among all citizens.15
Obviously, the rise of this intellectual “monster” that is identitarian laïcité is not a phenomenon that can be isolated from multiple tendencies to the exacerbation of nationalisms and to the “clash of civilizations” which, in connection with extreme violence, occur in the world today. Nevertheless, the “French” form is specific. It troubles us profoundly because it tends to reverse the political function of a principle which had played an essential role in our political history: ultimately, a certain laïcisme takes the place formerly occupied by a certain clericalism. A battle cry with sinister resonances, “La France aux français,” or “France belongs to the (pure) French people,” now seems to be heard in the form: “La France aux Laïques” (France only belongs to the secularists, in other words: anybody who is not and does not exhibit the standard emblems of being a secularist cannot be a French citizen with full rights).16 It is vital that we react collectively to this. But it is necessary to understand exactly what is happening, to redraw the “fronts” and the “borderlines,” and not to replay the old battles in the same way. Today’s battles, certainly, keep concerning the “spirit of the laws” (Montesquieu) in the French Republic. However, they are inscribed in a much wider cosmopolitical context, whose tendencies permanently influence our own actions, whether we like it or not. In this context, I hope we can keep (or regain) a capacity of “enlightened” emancipation from darkness and prejudices.