Prisca Afantchao
Edited by Briana Janeira (Senior Editor) and Diana Lytvynova (Junior Editor)
Abstract:
French laws enforce laïcité not to promote equality or separation of church and state, but rather to alienate racialized Muslims in France. The repression is excused on the basis of rationality, modernity, unity, and the integration of Muslim immigrants. Truthfully, integration is hindered due the veil being outlawed in the classroom, disintegrating the identities of Muslim people at the height of their psychological development, promoting compartmentalization. If laïcité continues to go unquestioned and untouched in the French law, there will never be a modern France without nationalisme laïciste and its white supremacy. This paper asserts that laïcité should not be reformed, but rather abolished in favor of laws protecting the right to wear religious garb in the classroom. Many legal scholars who have studied laïcité support its enforcement, citing the importance of separating church and state. Conversely, scholars in human rights and religious freedom, such as Alexis Artaud de la Ferrière argue that laïcité has evolved into an orthodoxy of state sanctioned secularism called nationalisme laïciste. It is less common for critical philosophy and critical race theory to challenge laïcité in the state of France. This paper seeks to apply critical philosophical concepts to legal analysis to find a more historicized argument for the abolishment of laïcité, considering the racial wounds caused by religious repression in colonial France when analyzing contemporary repression.
This paper argues that French laïcité law stages a ‘primal scene’ of racial exclusion, structurally embedding white nationalism within secular constitutionalism. Laïcité is defended as a way to maintain a unified French community, but in reality, it acts as a legal excuse for the perpetual foreignizing, destabilizing, and alienation of French Muslims, ultimately preventing unity. By foreignizing I mean juxtaposing any cultural or religious practices associated with Islam to “Frenchness.” The alienization comes from being legally obligated to keep part of your identity visually hidden and perhaps feeling that you don’t have a steady place to be fully yourself, which is destabilizing, especially for young people who are still growing up and establishing a sense of self which religion may be a part of. Physical lines are drawn, forcing hijabis to fracture themselves at the will of the French government. They cannot go past the school parking lot with their veil on and their clothing is often policed by school administrators. Analyzing the laws of laïcité through a critical philosophy of race, it becomes evident that legal enforcement of laïcité makes the physicality of Muslim youth a spectacle and prevents them from being fully themselves or “integrating” like the government wants.
Secularization and Modernization
Hijabis being in public is not a threat to secular government and although the United States is by no means a beacon of religious liberty or harmony, the Islamic veil is nowhere near being an impetus for the main religious-based conflict happening in American politics. There are multiple other Western liberal democracies that allow a hijab to be worn in public spaces like a public school or a workplace. France maintains a wall between religion and public life, while the U.S. emancipates itself from the sacred without denying it.
It is generally accepted that secularization and modernization are synonymous, and it is generally accepted that modernization and unification or harmony are synonymous. The Enlightenment and the Reformation, both strongly associated with secularization, are seen as much needed introductions of rationalism and sanity, compared to previous eras of governance and culture seen as overwhelmed by hereticism and fantasy in hindsight. Now, the labeling of the Islamic veil as an ostentatious display of religion pushes the hijabi student into being a symbol of a dark age, lacking agency, being controlled by religion, and bringing the past into the present. In contrast to the regular conception of the Enlightenment and the Reformation, “the initial moment of formation rested upon an outgrowth of fanatical religiosity—the heretication of non-conforming beliefs and behaviors the consequence of which was the intensification of power over community and territory.” Furthermore, in terms of religion, those eras were first marked by the maintenance of the status quo for the majority and the ruling class, not necessarily religious freedom or freedom of thought, etc. One can argue that modern conceptions of and enforcement of laïcité serve a similar function.
Nationalisme Laïciste
To analyze the wielding of laïcité as a tool of suppression by the French government, I will be interrogating the illegality of Muslim Algerian citizenship in 19th century colonial France, as the “primal scene” of French islamophobia which gives us “nationalisme laïciste.” Laïcité, both in the governmental and quotidian sphere, has become “nationalisme laïciste,” its own kind of orthodoxy. Nationalisme laïciste promotes a substantive normative belief that citizens should not only fulfill certain civic obligations to the nation but that they should believe in the moral goodness of the French Republican regime and publicly manifest their loyalty to that regime. By using the term “primal scene” I am not referring to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic writings but rather to the Professor & Director of Africana Studies at Villanova University, Vincent Llloyd’s conception of the relationship between dignity and domination. To Lloyd, the “primal scene” of domination/the marking of domination is the master/slave relationship as described in Frederick Douglass’s book Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. In this narration, Douglass and his master, Covey, fist-fight one-on-one. This interpretation of “primal scene” can be applied to multiple forms of domination, not solely anti-Black, white supremacist domination. Rape is the marking of patriarchy. Military and police violence is the marking of colonialism. Violence accompanied by poverty is the marking of capitalism.
Legally, a primal scene is equivalent to a case that sets legal precedent which continues to inflict harm on a certain population from that moment on. Every time a case is settled, a policy decision is made, or even classroom discipline is doled out based on this original unjust precedent, the injustice is reanimated. Applying the concept of the primal scene to laïcité, laïcité is not just a tool of legal repression but a systemic means of depersonalizing and demoralizing only racialized, Muslim, French people, rooted in colonial logic. Even before contemporary laïcité, religious repression was enforced through the Sénatus-consulte of July 14, 1865, requiring Algerians to renounce Islam in order to obtain French citizenship. Renouncing Islam was the only way for Algerians to be claimed as people worthy of transcending the status of colonial subjects and obtaining full citizenship status, along with the rights and respectability of citizenship. Though very few Algerians took this drastic step to become French citizens, the legacy of this Sénatus-consulte lives on through the enforcement of secular dress on French Muslims, most of whom are of African origin.
Laïcité is defended as a way to maintain a unified French community, but the enforcement of laïcité works against integration of French Muslims with the rest of French society. On the French government’s website, there is a document titled “Freedoms and Prohibitions in the Context of “Laïcité” (Constitutional Secularism).” Under the section “Freedoms and Rights Guaranteed by Laïcité” there are three points that stand out to me (emphasis my own):
- Laïcité guarantees freedom of conscience for everyone; this includes the freedom to believe or not to believe, to practice a religion, to be atheist, agnostic or to be an adept of humanist philosophies, to change religion or to cease to have any religion. A distinction must be drawn, however, between the freedom to believe and the freedom to express one’s beliefs. There can be no restriction to the freedom of belief…
- Laïcité guarantees the neutrality of the State, local authorities and public services, thereby ensuring their impartiality towards all citizens, regardless of their beliefs and convictions.
- No religion or conviction can be either privileged or discriminated against.
According to this webpage, laïcité is based on the separation of church and state, and it does not discriminate. This is a rosy description, however. The law may be codified and meant to be followed, but its ideals are not always followed, and a government laying out a law like “no religion or conviction can be either privileged or discriminated against” does not make it a reality. Discrimination still happens even when it is technically outlawed. Like freedom of speech laws, opinions/beliefs can be held without repercussions, but actions and expressions of those opinions/beliefs cannot be done without repercussions. This begs the question of why the wearing of the Islamic veil is an unacceptable expression of belief. To find the answer presented by the French government, one can look at the legislation around the March 2004 law that officially banned the Islamic veil in public schools. The ban was on “the wearing of signs or outfits demonstrating religious affiliation in public schools, colleges and high schools,” in the name of the principle of secularism, and included headscarves of Muslim girls, yarmulkes of Jewish boys, and turbans of Sikh boys, as well as large crosses. Religious symbols/attire that was allowed included small stars of David, small hands of Fatima, small crosses, and eventually under-turbans for Sikh men, but not full turbans. The answer seems to be that these types of religious symbols/attire are too imposing while the others are not and so the French government has the right to siphon certain religious expression to the private sphere because it is claiming to be defending constitutional secularism. A type of religious segregation has become the norm in France.
When students whose religious lives are already manipulated by the government enter school and are forced to suppress yet another part of their religious expression, laïcité no longer protects against the integration of church and state, but instead against the Muslim student’s personal sense of integration. This is an issue of human rights because, as stated by Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” France is a supposedly liberal state that is highly involved in global liberal institutions like the United Nations, yet their legal enactment of laïcité is not in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which these institutions, especially the United Nations itself, refer to so often and claim to uphold. The main discrepancy I find between the French government’s laïcité and Article 18 is that people should be able to practice their religion in public or in private and that is not allowed in France. Multiple elements of religious observance are pushed to the shadows in the name of laïcité, again, forcing compartmentalization of only some religious communities and challenging the notion that they are truly accepted in French society.
The disintegration caused by nationalisme laïciste is described perfectly in the 2016 novel by Nargesse Bibimoune, Confidence à mon voile (Confessions to my veil). The novel follows the protagonist from 2002 until 2016 and recounts her developing relationship with her veil as she grows up in France as a North African girl who is also a hijabi Muslim. She describes the fate of a peer who was kicked out of school for resisting the imposition of the laïciste laws against “ostentatious” displays of religion:
She was the only one who tried to resist, the only one who refused humiliation, the only one who refused self-exclusion. I cried a lot. For her first, then for me, for you, and for all the sisters who carry you, and who in the evening are alone in front of their fear. For all those who are pointed out, who are judged, condemned even before they could defend themselves, even before they could speak.
Many months later, she decides to wear a small bandana to school and reflects on the fact that, if the bandana was wider it would be illegal, too visible, too imposing, too Islamic, and she would be forced to remove it. She may scoff at the confines of the law, but she has no power to change it. Even her peer who spoke up against the law closer to its introduction could not do anything to stop it, only to challenge the status quo, and was subsequently expelled from school.
Conclusion
Ultimately, as Alexis Artaud de la Ferrière writes in his 2022 report, “From Laïcité to Nationalisme Laïciste” modern laïcité has developed into a way to restrict the freedoms of “minorities which are perceived as subservice to the ideal of national unity.” The equation of modernity with secularization and the true motivation of French secularization being the maintenance of cultural cohesion that serves white Frenchness combine to continue the suppression of hijabi students. In order to protect the liberties of Muslim people in France, especially Muslim school children, legal enforcement of laïcité as we know it should be completely abolished. Due to the repressive origins of the law, reform would likely be futile. Instead of protecting secularism over the bodily autonomy and psychological stability of youth in crucial days of development, the French government should begin by legally protecting the right to wear religious garb. Due to the longstanding intensity of French laïcité, I doubt the government would pass a law allowing full discussion of religious perspectives and beliefs in the classroom. However, I do argue that allowing students to wear the veil and other religious dress in the classroom is a positive, manageable first step towards less alienation of those marginalized on the basis of religion. Beginning in the classroom will encourage youth to be not only tolerant, but genuinely accepting of visible cultural differences. Eventually, a cultural shift will be more plausible, and more people will be able to consider physical, visible religious expression as part of the personal autonomy each citizen should be afforded on the basis of liberté, egalité, and fraternité.