Battle Over French Identity Continues to Rage

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Following his re-election for a second term as president of France, Emmanuel Macron delivered his acceptance speech at the Elysée Palace May 7 with an addendum to the French motto, with the words “liberté, égalité, fraternité et laicité.”

The French principle of “laicité” governing the separation of church and state has long been central to France’s democracy. The goal has been to guarantee freedom from religion as well as freedom of religion.

This has relevance to Canada, as Quebec takes this position as well. Passed in 2019, Bill 21, “An Act Respecting the Laicité of the State,” prohibits any public employee, including teachers, police officers, government lawyers, and others in positions of authority in Quebec, from wearing religious symbols in the workplace. Its opponents claim it discriminates against minorities, particularly Muslims.

In France, then French President Nicolas Sarkozy stated in 2009 that the burqa, an Islamic garment that conceals the face, was “not welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” A year later, the French National Assembly passed a law “prohibiting the concealment of the face in public space.”

Six years earlier, another ban had sparked debates pertaining to religious accommodation, religious identity, citizenship, Republicanism, and, most notably, laicité, usually translated as secularism. The March 2004 law stipulated that “in public schools, the wearing of symbols or clothing by which students conspicuously manifest a religious appearance is forbidden.”

Laicité is deeply embedded in French national culture, dating back to the French Revolution, which abolished all the privileges held by institutions which had dominated the French social and political landscape, including the Roman Catholic Church.

The final blow was struck in 1905 with the promulgation of the 1905 “French Law on the Separation of the Churches and State.” Public funding of faith-based schools ceased, ownership of religious buildings was transferred to the state, and the display of religious symbols was abolished.

The legislation reinforced the neutrality of the state on religious matters while simultaneously demarcating the boundary between the private and public spheres. But in the very different circumstances of 21^st century France, with its large Muslim population, this debate has been renewed.

On Oct. 16, 2020, French schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by an Islamist zealot after showing Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the prophet Muhammad to his class. Soon after, a group of French academics published a “Manifesto of the Hundred” in the Oct. 21 newspaper Le Monde, denouncing what they termed French academia’s persistent denial of Islamism.

On Nov. 2, another group of academics published a rebuttal in Le Monde, accusing the signatories of “an attack on civil liberties and the democratic rule of law,” of which academic freedom constituted an integral part. They accused their one hundred colleagues of waging a “McCarthyist witch hunt.”

While identity theory, or communautarisme as it is known in France, with its definition of communities along racial, ethnic, or religious lines, has not caught on among the public, it has gained considerable traction in academic circles. Macron himself warned against social science theories “imported” from the United States.

So the dispute not only underscored the fight between contending approaches to Islamism but also the transformation of French universities into a battleground between those seeking to preserve France’s universalist and secularist values and proponents of “multicultural” and “decolonization” theories, which often view Islamism as a legitimate response to long-standing white colonial oppression.

Despite the French left’s tradition of opposing religious symbols in the public sphere and its support of religion as belonging in the private domain, some currently denounce France’s limitations on religious symbols as evidence of Islamophobia. It has even been suggested that the law exploits laicité by making it an excuse for increasing anti-Muslim prejudice.

For instance, sociology professor Jean-François Bayart of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, asserted the existence of a “capitalist Islamophobia” in the Le Monde of Oct. 31, 2020, and claimed that a “republican McCarthyism” was at the heart of the French state and media.

Because France has one of the largest Muslim communities in Europe and its universities are widely seen as guardians and transmitters of the nation’s universalist values, the outcome of the debate will continue to have far-reaching implications.