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ОглавлениеThe War of Symbols: a Chronicle of a Debate Foretold
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The means by which French people were alerted to the issues raised in the previous chapter was through the presence of a few hundred veiled schoolgirls in French state schools. This chapter will first re-tell the story of the ‘war of the veil’, and then consider some key concepts and terms that this clash brought into prominence: laïcité (and the Republican tradition), the veil, integration and beur. My intention in examining these terms is to draw out some hidden political implications concerning how debate was structured: these assumptions form the context for the interventions by our four thinkers.
The war of the veil
It has become commonplace to suggest that the dispute surrounding the status of veiled schoolgirls in French state schools started, out of the blue, in September 1989.1 In that month, three veiled schoolgirls were excluded from the Gabriel-Havez college in Creil, a small town north of Paris, on the grounds that their veils were not compatible with the laïque principles of the French state schooling system. Their veils were relatively light pieces of cloth covering their hair, but not their faces: nothing like the small tents that the Taliban imposed on the women of Kabul. (Indeed, ‘headscarf’ is probably a more accurate word, and was used more widely in the early 1990s. I will use ‘veil’ as it was the most commonly circulating word after 2000.) The Socialist Party was confused by the incident: a substantial minority in the party felt deep loyalty to the ideals of laïcité and therefore strongly supported criticisms of the girls’ behaviour. Party lines were further muddled by the publication of a manifesto in the left-leaning Nouvel Observateur weekly, signed by prominent intellectuals such as Elisabeth Badinter, Régis Debray and Alain Finkielkraut, which called for a stronger defence of laïcité against the threat represented by the schoolgirls. Christian Democrats, normally located in the centre or centre-right of the French political spectrum, were more tolerant of the veiled schoolgirls. A long, tortuous, legal-constitutional argument followed, and it was finally accepted in July 1995 that veil-wearing schoolgirls could be – reluctantly – tolerated in French state schools as long as they did not engage in active attempts to convert other pupils to Islam.2 Disputes continued, and in the late 1990s about 150 cases each year went to a central arbitration body.3
In reality, it is clear that the episode in 1989 was a new chapter in a far longer story that could be dated back to 1830 (the French invasion of Algeria), if not still earlier.4 The question returned to the political agenda in 2003, when the two daughters of a secular French-Jew converted to Islam. In October 2003, they returned to their school in Aubervilliers wearing headscarves. They were excluded from the school a few days later: it seems that some laïque militants in the school publicized their case, and therefore it was closely followed by the French media.
At first sight, these seem absurd episodes: how could the Republic be threatened by a few hundred (at most a thousand) schoolgirls choosing to wear veils on their heads? How could Chirac, in 2003, publicly associate himself with those who stated that they considered that wearing a veil to be an aggressive act? The contradictions in such arguments seem so obvious: does not Marianne, the buxom symbol of the French Republic, normally cover her hair? Are veil-wearing Catholic nuns also to be understood as aggressive?
At this point we have to consider at least three further dimensions to this issue. First, a general point: schooling occupies an intensely important position within French political culture, and it is no exaggeration to say that the school – understood principally as the state school – is the prime symbol of Republican values. French state schools have also performed reasonably effectively as a means of social promotion for some of the excluded and marginalized.5 For some years, however, schoolteachers have been complaining of a decline in respect for their role, and – perhaps more seriously – of increased levels of aggression and violence in their schools. Such complaints received a powerful expression in a collection of essays and interviews edited by Emmanuel Brenner in 2004, with the provocative, memorable title of The Republic’s Lost Territories.6 The picture that emerges from this work is certainly alarming. Some 405 anti-Semitic acts were recorded in France between September 2000 and January 2002: many of these incidents were violent, and the numbers recorded were undoubtedly increasing. Tags and graffiti were becoming more common in many schools. Students were growing more aggressive and ruder towards staff, and on occasion would challenge teachers or simply refuse to follow lessons. While Brenner was concerned about all forms of racism, he made it clear that the rise in anti-Semitism was the most important issue facing the Republic. He left his readers in no doubt about the cause of this crisis: these acts were the result of a concerted move against Republican values by some Muslims. ‘To denounce the anti-Semitic, anti-French and anti-Republican evolution of a section of the North African community is not to stigmatize them,’ he explained, ‘but is – on the contrary – to defend their right to integration in France.’7 More importantly, Brenner drew an impassioned moral lesson from these events. He thundered to his readers: ‘Let the Republic rise again!’; they had grown too lax; they must fight to prevent ‘the decay’ of the Republic’s values. ‘The whole of French society today seems to be morally and intellectually disarmed when faced with the assertion of religious and identity politics which is at work in the Arabo-Muslim community.’8 This book was also a passionate call to revive a certain Republican activism.
Brenner also provided a clear, easy explanation for the increasing numbers of Muslim women wearing headscarves in public. They were, quite simply, part of an Islamist strategy to subvert the Republic and evidence of a growing illiberalism among the Muslim minority. (In reality, the dynamics and meanings of the veil are far more complex than Brenner’s hasty caricatures suggest: we will return to this point in the next sections.)
Brenner’s book was extremely influential, to the point where its perspectives and analyses had some direct effect on the findings of the Stasi Commission on laïcité.9 Its analysis of the state of French schooling can be questioned. One point which is particularly worrying is the manner in which Brenner conflates all challenges to the established school practices. Can it be argued that, for example, a demand by pupils for special provision so that they can respect Ramadan is the equivalent of a violent, anti-Semitic act? Can it be argued that wearing a Palestinian keffieh is the equivalent of spray-painting a tag on a school wall? These seemed to be the conclusions of the sensationalistic, undifferentiated – and often anecdotal – evidence cited by Brenner. Furthermore, as is nearly always the case in this type of conspiracy literature, the masterminds of the plot are never actually named. True, Brenner makes passing reference to the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UOIF: Union of Islamic Organizations of France – see chapter four), and also notes the activities of a tiny, largely Strasbourg-based party, the Parti des musulmans de France (PMF – Party of French Muslims).10 But it is hard to believe that the UOIF, a group essentially concerned with the administration of mosques, or the tiny PMF have the power to control a plot which – supposedly – stretches across the whole of France’s schools. Moving further from Brenner’s emotionally charged perspectives, one notes how little he refers to social factors. Rather than blaming Muslims for a decline in courtesy and discipline in the schools, it seems more likely that these shifts are related to broader changes in the relationship between school, work and society, which have produced a context in which many young people have intuitively realized that working hard at school will not guarantee them a future in a fluctuating, uncertain and threatening work environment.11 Finally, there is no sensitivity in Brenner’s text to those who find the school to be ‘an instrument of humiliation, of elimination, of yet more discrimination’.12 Teachers, according to Brenner, are always benevolent, well-meaning liberals.
Alongside Brenner’s Republican revivalism, there was also a political dimension in the renewal of interest in French Muslims in 2003–4. Since 1989, there had been a series of largely unsuccessful attempts to create some formal, institutional representation for French Muslims, similar to the organizations which exist for French Catholics, Protestants and Jews (see chapter four). This had been a relatively uncontroversial idea: during the presidential elections of 2002, none of the major candidates had made any prominent reference to this point and – indeed – even laïcité featured rarely in their programmes. Following the dramatic election, however, Chirac was in search of big political gestures which would allow him to appear as a truly national leader. He was also concerned by any successes by potential rivals on his right or left. In the course of 2003, the energetic Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy, seemed at last to be succeeding in building a representative structure for French Muslims. In particular, he appeared to have a stable working relationship with the UOIF. Sarkozy even gave a speech to the organization at its prominent annual congress at Le Bourget, in April 2003. At one point he was noisily booed by the assembled listeners, but he did not come away with a desire to settle scores. It seems possible that this point initiated a political strategy by right-wing politicians loyal to Chirac. For some on the right, Sarkozy’s approach to Islam was ‘too politically correct’.13 They were alarmed by the minister’s growing popularity and sought to outmanoeuvre their rival. Their idea was to strengthen legislation on the presence of religious symbols at schools, specifically the veil, in order to force Sarkozy into a more confrontational position with the UOIF.14
Under these circumstances, veiled schoolgirls acquired a new importance in the national subconscious. They were no longer a few hundred eccentrically dressed youngsters, usually with impeccable school records and good classroom discipline: instead they were the visible representatives of a sinister conspiracy. An editorial in the left-of-centre daily Libération made this point clear: it spoke of ‘a handful of veil-wearers who are exploited, whether voluntarily or not, by fundamentalist strategies’.15 In many cases, discussions of schoolgirls with headscarves spiralled outwards in ever-increasing circles. Judith Kramer’s article in the New Yorker is probably the finest example of this tendency to pile exaggeration on exaggeration: in a thirteen-page essay which begins by discussing the case of a veil-wearing teacher, the text moves on to cite Islamism in France, Islamism in the Arab world, Saudi funding for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Algerian elections of 1991 (in which the Muslim FIS were denied their victory by military action), male violence, pornography, polygamy and female genital mutilation.16 A dissident feminist publication discussing this type of writing accurately observed that ‘veiled women became, in the French imagination, the sign of all the evils which threatened the Republic and its values’.17
These three dimensions – public concern with the condition of schooling, political machinations within the parliamentary right and the wild exaggeration of the importance of a few hundred headscarves – played a determining role in the deliberations of the Stasi Commission set up by Chirac, and the somewhat less important Debré Commission created by the National Assembly.
Early in 2003, Chirac chose Bernard Stasi to chair an enquiry into the application of laïcité in the Republic. The Commission opened on 3 July 2003, and presented its final report on 11 December 2003. It had twenty members, of whom six were women, and included nine academics, three officials from educational administration, three politicians, two lawyers, two activists from local associations and one representative from business. Politically, it represented a balance of left-wing and right-wing opinion.18 It included three people with some personal experience of Muslim cultures: Mohammed Arkoun, a 75-year-old authority on Islamic thought, who appears to have remained surprisingly silent during debates; Hanifa Cherifi, the chief negotiator for the education ministry, who did not consider that there was a crisis in the schools, and Gaye Petek, the head of an association working to encourage the integration of Turks into France. The Commission conducted 104 public interviews and about forty private interviews (including contacts with five Masonic lodges).19 It also received some two thousand letters. Questions have been raised about how people were selected for interview: Jean Baubérot, a Commission member, later wondered why all the teachers interviewed seemed to be so firmly anti-veil, when opinion polls indicated that the teaching body was divided on the question.20 The dynamics operating in the Commission are still open to question: of its twenty members only one, the respected conservative historian René Rémond, dissented from its final conclusion. There was a surprising shift in attitudes by a number of Commission members who had previously refused to support legislation banning the veil from state schools. For example, the sociologist Alain Touraine had previously welcomed the ‘modernism’ of a new generation of veil-wearing schoolgirls.21 Why did he change his mind?
It appears that the Stasi Commission initially decided not to interview any veiled schoolgirls. Its brief was to review laïcité in France: during their research, none of the Commission’s members seem to have contacted any of France’s numerous, well-informed and original analysts of Muslim culture. Stasi himself was a 70-year-old Christian Democrat who could remember French anti-Semitism during the Occupation. He was a man of impeccably liberal, anti-racist views, who could boast that each of his four grandparents came from a different nation: Tuscany, Corsica, Cuba and Spain.22 ‘I don’t want to live in a country where there are only white people’ he stated.23 He later spoke out against the politicization of the question of immigration during the 2007 presidential election campaign. Stasi believed in France as a ‘dynamic, living, exemplary’ model of integration through laïcité.24 His only direct contact with a Muslim culture, however, seemed to date from the late 1950s, when he had worked in Algeria in its last years as a French colony.25 His Commission was confused by Muslim practices, and yet they chose to rely on their own resources. As one member later stated: ‘The veil hid a forest, a dense forest, which was difficult to penetrate.’26 The great bulk of the people they interviewed were not Muslims, and the evidence they heard tended to confirm the images previously established by Brenner: there were an increasing number of what might be termed ‘border disputes’ as Muslims began to make specific demands in schools, hospitals and prisons. There was even a broader social dimension: Commission members began to re-conceive the depressed and impoverished banlieues (suburbs) around Paris and other French cities as further examples of ‘lost territories’, ‘in which Islamists run the show’.27 The fact that accurate figures concerning the number of veiled schoolgirls were not available only worried the Commission still further. This was a further sign of laxity, of the frightening inability of Republican authorities to control the dense forest. Under these circumstances, the Commission members found it easiest to follow Brenner’s analysis: there was an insidious plot to undermine the Republic.
Touraine seems to have been one of the few to retain some doubts. He belatedly insisted that the Commission hear from veil-wearing schoolgirls themselves, against Stasi’s original proposal.28 By this moment, most of the Commission members had made up their mind. One (or more?) of the handful of veiled schoolgirls they heard in private recounted ‘the daily humiliation she felt when she was forced to wear the veil’.29 (It seems likely that Chahdortt Djavann’s interview also impressed some members.)30 This was the last piece in the jigsaw: the Commission members now felt confident that in proposing that the veil should be banned from state schools, they were acting to emancipate a generation of Muslim schoolgirls. ‘Thus, without any real debate,’ records Jean Barbérot, ‘it was suggested that one could not really believe in male-female equality and tolerate the headscarf in state schools.’31 In the final report, Stasi declared that ‘the Republic cannot stay deaf to the cries of distress from these young girls’.32
Having heard a litany of France’s problems, the Commission was expected to act.33 Some of its members still doubted whether banning veils from state schools would really solve these issues, but were then faced with the awkward dilemma of how to justify inactivity in the face of pressing problems. Brenner’s book and Kramer’s article show how issues appeared to the Commission members: not acting, not legislating, seemed to be accepting fundamentalism, the creation of ghettoes in France, the rise of intolerance and even female genital mutilation. The sense that they were expected to act weighed heavily on the Commission: Patrick Weill later recalled ‘I must admit that I have never worked under this amount of public pressure coming from all sides.’34 In this situation, it seemed better to do something. After all, the proposed law was ‘the tracing of a border, a limit and not … an atavistic rejection of diversity’.35 Stasi himself put great pressure on his Commission’s members to maintain unity: one morning there was an informal show of hands among the Commission on the subject on banning ‘ostensible’ signs. Three members (including Touraine) voted against the proposal. Stasi spoke personally to all three, stressing how inactivity or neutrality would be perceived by the French public, and insisting on a second vote in the afternoon. Only one member persisted in voting against: Jean Baubérot.36 Moreover, Stasi remained convinced that the purpose of his Commission was not so much to regulate the veil in schools, as to re-create laïcité for the twenty-first century. While excluding certain expressions of Muslim identity with one hand, the Commission devised twenty-six imaginative measures to integrate Muslims and other minorities with the other hand, including the official celebration of Muslim religious festivals in schools, the provision of halal food in school canteens, the provision of Muslim religious facilities in jails and – above all – creating a careful distinction between a legitimate (or ‘discreet’) religiosity and an unacceptable (or ostensible) religiosity in schools. (Unfortunately, while Jewish skull-caps and small crucifixes were deemed discreet, veils, headscarves or hijabs were not.) Commission members with doubts about their actions could therefore reassure themselves that their bulk of their proposals were not condemnatory and exclusionary: their ultimate purpose was to integrate.
Such subtle distinctions were of little concern to the press and to the mass of politicians. The one issue taken from the seventy-two-page report was the proposal to ban the ostensible veil in state schools. Stasi himself seems to have been genuinely surprised by this: ‘What has disturbed me is how the debate has focused on the headscarf, while the mission [of the Commission] was far larger, far greater.’37 Other Commission members shared his disappointment and bewilderment. Gaye Petek told Le Monde ‘how many times did we say that the veil is not the main issue!’38 In one television debate, Stasi proved surprisingly sensitive about criticisms of his work from a leading member of the UOIF. ‘I won’t let you say that I’m attacking the dignity of Muslims. It’s not right to say that France is an anti-Muslim country. It’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong! It’s a lie!’39 Yet the final effect of the Commission’s report was a proposal to aid integration by excluding a few hundred schoolgirls.
Public reactions to this report and the wider ‘debate’ were predictable. In 2002, French people in general had been suspicious of the veil, but hardly saw it as an important issue. In the course of 2003–4, they were taught to be scared of it. There was a massive, sustained and extremely misleading coverage of questions concerning Muslims and minorities. Pierre Tevanian estimated that matters concerning the veil and/or laïcité were front-page headline news on at least 26 occasions in 2003 and that in the same year France’s three leading daily papers – Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro – contained 1,284 articles on these topics: more than one article per day per paper.40 ‘One gets the impression that this matter is the most serious and most urgent challenge facing our country’ noted one sceptical journalist in Le Monde.41 A record 150 deputies asked to speak in the relevant parliamentary debates early in February: in practice, only 120 actually spoke (about an eighth of their number in parliament) and of these, only 18 were women.42 ‘Everyone spoke of us, about us, but without us, and we had no way of replying’ noted one veil-wearing Muslim activist.43 The final result of this onslaught was summed up by the Catholic daily La Croix: the Stasi Commission had proved ‘that there really exists a rampant islamisation among immigrant families’.44
Deputies were motivated by similar concerns to those which had shaped the Stasi report, and doubters were worried about appearing apathetic in the face of a pressing crisis. Voting for action, even inadequate and inappropriate action, seemed better than doing nothing. On 10 February 2004, 494 deputies voted for the law, 36 against, and 31 abstained. 90 per cent of the right-wing UMP deputies voted for, as did 94 per cent of the Socialist deputies. There was less certainty among the deputies of the centrist UDF (13 for, 12 abstentions and 4 against) and more opposition from the Communist deputies (7 for, 14 against). The Verts (Greens) were the only national party represented in the Chamber of Deputies who were openly critical of the law: two of their three deputies voted against, and the third abstained.45
Outside the National Assembly, the situation was somewhat more complex. Tevanian’s research suggests that prior to this media campaign, there was little significant concern about veiled schoolgirls. In a study conducted in December 2003 among 125 students at Drancy (north of Paris), only one spontaneously raised the veil as an issue.46 Certainly, when asked, French people showed themselves to be suspicious of the veil. A set of opinion polls from April 2003 suggested about 74 per cent of the French population were against the veil being worn in schools, but only 22 per cent wanted to exclude veil-wearing schoolgirls.47 During the course of the media campaign, public opinion turned in favour of a law banning religious signs in state schools: from 49 per cent according to one opinion poll in April 2003 to 76 per cent in September 2004.48 However, throughout this period, there was always one significant qualification: Muslims (however they were defined) were consist ently recorded as being more sceptical about a law than the non-Muslim population.49 Thus CSA opinion polls from December 2003 and January 2004 found 69 per cent of French public opinion in favour of the law, while only 42 per cent of French Muslims supported such a law.50 There can be no doubt that the debate concerning this law played a part in encouraging a clearer sense of difference among French Muslims from the bulk of the French population.
Some critical voices emerged in the media. There was a trenchant and hard-hitting editorial in Le Monde entitled ‘The politics of fear’, which accused Chirac of exploiting the public affection for laïcité and reducing the great principles it represented to an irrational fear of the veil.51 The Council of Christian Churches – a representative body which includes Catholics and Protestants – signalled its doubts about the drift from ‘a calm laïcité’ to ‘fighting laïcité’.52 Trade unions often seemed uncertain: thus the moderate-left CFDT welcomed the Stasi Report, but was worried by how it might be implemented.53 The left-wing CGT re-affirmed its commitment to laïcité, but suggested that social and economic reform would be the best way to build a cohesive nation.54 The FSU teachers’ union also affirmed its loyalty to the principles of laïcité, but worried about how these were to be affirmed by a proposal to exclude pupils, and also raised the troubling question of how the law was to be interpreted.55 At a local level, teachers themselves were often unsure. In the lycée Jean-Jaurès in Montreuil in November 2003, there were 12 veil-wearing pupils in a student body of 1,200. A strong minority of the teachers wanted their exclusion; the school management refused to act. Arguments among the teachers were bitter and divisive: seven general assemblies in two months did not create a united policy. Instead, there was an acrimonious debate on the nature of laïcité. ‘I don’t need a Muslim to tell me what laïcité is!’ one angry teacher told Libération.56 French human rights and anti-racist organizations were similarly divided. MRAP was consistently concerned with the manner in which the stigmatization of some Muslims as anti-French subversives easily led to a stigmatization of all Muslims.57 The venerable Ligue des Droits de l’homme (LDH – League of the Rights of Man) preferred dialogue and social justice to a law that stigmatized part of the population.58
The final result of this so-called ‘debate’ was to create a type of special status for French Muslims, putting their activities and proposals under particular scrutiny. John R. Bowen cites a good example: across France, many swimming pools had accepted requests from Jewish groups that there should be a few hours per week in which pools were reserved for women. However, when it was learnt in June 2003 that a group of Arab women made a similar request in Lille, this was immediately cited by hostile commentators as another example of Islamic communautarisme in practice.59
There remained something unusual, even uncomfortable, about the debate. The volume of press articles and parliamentary speeches, the repeated variations on the same simple theme, all suggested more a nation trying to convince itself that it was right than a genuine consensus. More specifically, the debate cut across established political boundaries, often dividing long-term friends from each other.
Laïcité and the Republic
Observant readers may have noted that the term ‘laïcité’ was used seventeen times in the last section – and yet no definition was given. There is a simple reason for this: no commonly agreed definition is available.
The law which established the separation of church and state in France was passed in 1905: its text did not make use of the noun laïcité nor the adjective laïque. The first occasion that the term was cited in a constitutional document was in 1946, with the founding of the Fourth Republic; the term was then repeated in the constitution of the current Fifth Republic (1958).60 For many Republicans, laïcité is a touchstone, not just a guarantee of French patriotism but also a type of indisputable proof of French identity.61 The term also works to suggest a cultural contrast with other identities: according to the respected conservative historian Max Gallo, ‘Islam opposes its concepts to ours, the first of which are laïcité and tolerance’.62 Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, a Stasi Commission member, writes in a similar manner that immigrants must be prepared to accept the values of laïcité in order to be integrated into France, noting that those who come from ‘traditional or theocratic’ societies will find it a difficult concept to understand.63
One or two commentators draw attention to some odd features of the concept. Nicolas Weill, a journalist from Le Monde, sent a French-language article on laïcité to a translator, and was amazed to learn that there was no English-language translation for the term.64 The perceptive and articulate commentator Olivier Roy notes how despite its constitutional importance, no one has provided an accepted legal definition of what constitutes laïcité.65 The so-called ‘liberal mufti’ of Marseilles, Soheib Bencheikh, finds it to be ‘an imprecise concept’ and notes that there is no official definition of what the term means.66 But, as we will see, these are exceptional, atypical voices.
There are some odd features in the manner in which the concept has been used in the ‘debate’ of 2003–4. Consider the following interventions:
Jacques Chirac: ‘[Laïcité] expresses our wish to live together in respect, dialogue and toleration.’67
Christian Bourepaux: ‘[Laïcité is] the principle of a balance between the public sphere and the private sphere.’68
Anne Vigerie and Anne Zelensky: ‘Laïcité is based on a neutral public sphere, one free of all religious belief.’69
Jean Ayrault: ‘[Laïcité] is an emancipatory process which started almost a hundred years ago … It is a light to women imprisoned by obscurantism, it is hope for oppressed minorities.’70
Une école pour tou-te-s: ‘Laïcité, as defined by the laws of 1881, 1882, 1886 and 1905, constitutes a guarantee for the liberty of conscience and the emancipation of men and women outside of religious dogma.’71
François Fillon: ‘This principle, the fruit of a long history, is based on the respect for the liberty of conscience and the affirmation of common values which create a national unity over and above particular loyalties.’72
Jean-Pierre Raffarin: ‘Laïcité, our laïcité, is not the refusal of religion … laïcité is … a grammar which allows a calm, pacified dialogue between religions and the state within our country’.73
Council of Christian Churches in France: ‘In fact, laïcité’s aim is not to create spaces which are emptied of all religious presence, but to present a space where all, believer and non-believers, can debate … what is acceptable and unacceptable, differences to be respected and errors to be avoided: and all this [in a context] of mutual understanding, without silencing the convictions and motivations of one another, but also without clashes and propaganda.’74
There are some surprising common features to these pronouncements. First, there can be no doubt concerning the importance with which each invest the principle of laïcité. Secondly, there is the curious assertive form which these pronouncements take: there is no reference whatsoever to exterior authorities, no footnote to the thirteen-volume tome by Professors J. Dullard and F. Raud (Dullsville University Press, 1994), nor even any reference to the actual practices of the French state – with the curious exception of Une école pour tou-te-s (a group to be considered in chapter four). And here, in this rare attempt to produce some contextualization, the Une école pour tou-te-s reference appears to be factually incorrect. Thirdly, during most of this debate, most commentators seemed to be blissfully unaware that contradictory claims were being made about the nature of laïcité. Occasionally, some left-wing critics argued that President Chirac presented too minimalist a concept of laïcité.75 But apart from these rare dissonances, the ‘debate’ in 2003–4 seemed to take the form of a surrealistic ballet, in which each participant danced to a separate tune, while claiming that the performance as a whole was an marvellous example of coordinated national unity.
Looking at these varied interventions, some patterns emerge. The concept is being exploited tactically, as a means of persuading audiences of the speaker’s mastery of words and ideals.76 But in fact, for all the references to universal values and rationalism, these empty sound bites are the very opposite of rational debate and analysis. Laïcité is perhaps the key concept which differentiates contemporary French ideals about the state from British or American ideals. Rather than seeing the state in its classical liberal concept as a neutral arbiter between the competing claims of individuals, these emotionally charged references often refer back to the rival, Rousseau-ian concept of the state as the embodiment of a collective ‘general will’. This concept can be linked to the origins of modern political culture in France: the primary goal of the first Republicans of the 1790s was not to create a political party, but to re-configure France in such a form that its natural political unity would be revealed and strengthened. A consequence of this stance was the slow and uneven creation of modern political parties in modern France: arguably, the first true national party was the Radical Party, created in 1901.77
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of Marxism, there has been a re-creation of republicanism in France, leading to a distinctive form of neo-republicanism which presents republican ideals as a fully formed political philosophy, as intricate and as demanding as Marxism.78 To date, these initiatives have not been successful in creating mass political movements, but they have decisively changed the manner in which politics is debated in France. The war of the veil was one episode in this development.
The political function of laïcité was illustrated in a comment by Jean-Marc Ayrault, the leader of the Socialist Group in the Chamber of Deputies: without a stronger assertion of laïcité, France would become a land which was dominated by the principle of ‘Each for himself and God for all!’79 Laïcité here is presented as a neo-republican principle which binds isolated individuals together in some collective endeavour. It carries a surprising social interventionism: Régis Debray explicitly argues that laïcité has to be legislated, it can never be produced spontaneously.80 This is not a new feature. Jean Baubérot, a Stasi Commission member, analysing the debates that took place a century ago, notes a revealing contrast. Catholics argued for ‘freedom of teaching’, meaning that churches and other groups should be allowed to create their own schools with minimal control from the state. Defenders of laïcité replied that what counted was ‘the teaching of freedom’: the Republican state had to intervene through the schooling system to ensure that the condition of freedom was created.81 In a sense, the same debate is being replayed today: the chief aim for the state school is to equip its pupils with the necessary moral, political and cultural vocabulary to attain the neo-republican, quasi-Rousseau-ian state of freedom. The veil not only prevents the individual schoolgirl from attaining this condition, it also disrupts the teaching of freedom to the other pupils. Therefore, its ban is justified. Mohammed Abdi, a reluctant convert to the necessity of the law, explains his attitude by citing a quotation from abbé Grégoire, an important politician from the early years of the French Revolution: ‘When comparing the weak and the strong, [it should be remembered] that it is liberty which oppresses the weak and it is the law which liberates them.’82
From this type of thinking also comes the stress by many left-leaning participants on the importance of ‘dialogue’ with veil-wearing girls rather than a simple process of immediate expulsion: for the self-image of the schooling system, one must attempt to win over even the lost sheep by an appeal to reason. As will be seen shortly, in practice the law worked differently.
There are many problems with such arguments. One is that it is clear that there are many incompatible, rival conceptions of this ‘teaching of freedom’. For some, particularly those on the political left, laïcité expressed anti-clerical values and amounted to putting religion in its place: subordinate to the political sphere, faith was reduced to an individual practice within the private sphere, as in the example cited in the last chapter: ‘Jews indoors, French citizens outside’. This interpretation was certainly the dominant idea a century ago. However, the practice of laïcité evolved over the decades: in the words of France’s most senior religious representatives, it moved from ‘fighting laïcité’ to ‘calm laïcité’.83 The appearance of laïcité in the constitution of 1946 was an indication of a new spirit, as a revitalized France shook off the stains of collaboration and Occupation, and a new type of modern, liberal Catholicism accepted a form of moderate, consensual laïcité.84 Thus, within the quotations cited above, Catholics and conservatives tend to refer to laïcité in more pragmatic terms, seeing it principally as a structure to enable the diverse elements of a society to negotiate competing claims peacefully. As the quotations from Chirac, Raffarin and Fillon demonstrate, such a stance can easily degenerate into an amorphous list of good causes which no one could contest. While the first concept of laïcité tends to be positively anti-clerical, the second is more genuinely neutral in spirit.
There are, however, some rather more fundamental problems. Given the diversity of opinions concerning laïcité, given its cloudy, semi-legal, semi-public nature, how does one ensure that one has understood and accepted these principles? The Muslim activist Dr Abdullah makes a telling point about such processes: ‘often what is not said is more important than the principles to which people refer’.85 For example, a Muslim woman is first informed that religious symbols are not permitted in her workplace, as they would break the code of laïcité. Later, she is told that, of course, a Christmas tree is not a religious symbol and so it is permitted. How is she to react?86 To protest would merely reveal that she has not understood the principles of laïcité, which are immediately obvious to all true French citizens. Laïcité’s confused nature is thus politically useful: it permits inconsistencies and double standards where a clearer, more rational code would better enable minorities to situate themselves within French political culture.
Furthermore, while the values which are asserted in the name of laïcité may sound wholesome and uncontroversial – who could object to freedom and toleration? – the assertion of these values should not be confused with the real embodiment of them. Many pupils find their schooling to be an alienating, meaningless experience. Brenner describes a situation in which Muslim pupils bring prejudices into the school: he ignores another scenario, through which it is the teachers themselves who are prejudiced, and who abuse their position of power to bully and stigmatize pupils. The ‘war of the veil’ certainly provided many examples of ill-treatment, for it stimulated greater public hostility to Muslims in general and veiled women in particular. Examples of ill-treatment in schools are easy to find. First, there was the absurdity of the law, whereby non-Muslim girls were allowed to wear bandanas, but Muslims were often not allowed to do so, because their bandanas were defined by the school authorities as religious symbols. Thus Mona, at school in the Nord, was told that her bandana counted as ‘ostensible’ because she had been a veil-wearer.87 Mariame experienced a ridiculous variant of the same theme: she was wrongly entered in the class register as ‘Marianne’, and therefore not suspected of being an Arab. Under these circumstances, she was allowed to wear a bandana.88 As the law was enforced, more serious incidents took place. A 16-year-old girl, forced to remove her veil, recalls this as a moment of ‘shame, guilt and a burning sense of injustice’. For her, the school becomes a place of ‘hate, never-ending pain and bitterness’.89 One veiled 15-year-old girl, temporarily excluded from classes in September 2004, reported that ‘I was shut in a room with a window. I was forbidden to go out during the breaks. They treated me as if I was a monster! But I’m not a monster!’90 Keltoum from Mantes-la-Jolie suffered a similar treatment: ‘we were held in a separate room, as if we were wild beasts’.91 Sonia was not allowed to go into the schoolyard during recreations, and was even kept out of sight.92 Meetings between veil-wearers and teachers could take the form of tense confrontations as Mariame found out when a female teacher spoke to her.
If you won’t obey the law, you can always go back home.
What do you mean by ‘back home’?
Well … back home!
Yes, but for me, home is here. Where do you want me to go?
You know exactly what I mean.93
Rather than ‘liberating’ these girls, the new law made their lives more difficult. Fadila comments ‘I really think that people are more and more racist, as if the new law gives them a reason to dislike veiled girls. When I catch a bus, it’s crazy. People make signs, jostle me, sneer, whisper as we pass, or shout out insults.’94 Another veiled twelve-year-old had similar experiences. ‘Last year, I was attacked by three men outside the school who spat in my face, hit me, and insulted me. At school, they tell us that we’re weak-minded, and manipulated.’ For these girls, the school is part of a continuum of racist practices in French society, not an oasis of liberty and toleration. As for the new law’s promise of ‘dialogue’, the same veil-wearing girl found that in practice it meant ‘obey or get out’.95 Following the law, and her forced submission to its provisions, another schoolgirl’s reaction was typical: ‘I lost all my confidence: when a whole society and the entirety of the media show us as submissive, fragile and deviant girls, you end up by believing it and dropping out.’96 Shifting our focus to universities, a revealing incident took place at a lecture in the Faculty of Pharmacy in Nantes University on 20 January 2004. A few minutes into his presentation, the lecturer suddenly stopped and stared at a veil-wearing student. ‘What’s that? What’s that veil? Pick up your things and get out.’ There is no suggestion that the student in question had been disruptive in any way. The lecturer later explained his actions to the local paper. ‘It’s very upsetting for the lecturer. She was pissing me about [elle vient se foutre devant moi en me narguant]… I saw it as a provocation. I think of myself as a humanist, but I can’t accept someone trying to impose their vision of the world on me.’97 The blind hypocrisy implied by the lecturer’s words is astonishing: there is not a thought for the public humiliation suffered by the student in question. The student’s simple presence is interpreted as an attack, while the lecturer’s heavy-handed aggression is presented by him as legitimate defence.
Veil-wearing women undoubtedly face forms of harassment and hostility, running from a simple, unthinking fear of the unknown, to more sinister forms of deliberately organized racism. Under these circumstances, one might have expected that the representatives of the Republic, those who pride themselves on their commitment to fraternity and integration, would have chosen to demonstrate to the people of France that these young women should also be accepted as citizens of France. If Chirac could make this type of gesture for a dead tramp, then why not for a veil-wearing schoolgirl? Instead, the leaders of the French state chose to act in precisely the opposite manner: they chose to add to the stigmatization and hostility which these women face.
The call to defend laïcité echoes through these debates. In Tunis, Chirac had described the veil as ‘aggressive’. Brenner’s calculated use of military or colonial metaphors – ‘the lost territories’ – is a second example of the same stance. To this was added a new presentation of laïcité as weak. Debray wrote of a vast theocratic onslaught on vulnerable secular societies.98 Chirac spoke of laïcité as a ‘subtle, precious and fragile balance’.99 The conservative politician Debré wrote in his report that French inactivity in the face of threats appeared as ‘admitting weakness, a sign of impotence’.100 The veil constituted ‘the start of an attack on republican laïcité’, argued the laïque polemist Michèle Vianès.101 Stasi spoke of teachers who felt that they were the ‘victims’ of a permanent guerrilla campaign against laïcité.102
These phrases are both dangerous and significant. They are dangerous because – as in the examples cited above – they encourage and justify aggressive actions against veil-wearing girls, on the grounds that this is a form of pre-emptive strike. But they are also significant, as they suggest an important shift in Republican political culture. Putting them together, one gets a picture of a Republic which is honest, slow to react to provocation, perhaps just a little too well-meaning and benevolent for its own good, which is being outmanoeuvred by a mysterious, malign and unnamed international conspiracy of highly organized militants … a near-perfect reproduction of the worldview of the anti-Semitic anti-Dreyfusards of the 1890s.103 The far right is exploiting precisely this sort of discourse. Philippe de Villiers bemoans the fate of France, split between the France of ‘globalized elites’ and ‘the France that is suffering’. ‘The Republic has entrenched itself in a laïc citadel, on which the tsunami on Islamism is crashing down.’104 The emotion which well-established politicians bring to the theme of laïcité, their unprincipled stigmatization of a minority group within French society as the base for a subversive conspiracy and their appeal to a sense of victimization among the mass of the French population produces a political culture which increasingly resembles that of the populist, anti-Semitic, proto-fascist new right of the late nineteenth century.105
The most curious point of all is the unity with which all major French political parties proclaim the need to defend laïcité, apparently under attack. But among France’s main political traditions – the Front National, the Gaullists, Christian-Democrats and Socialists – one finds stout defences of laïcité. Among the more minor traditions – the Greens, Muslims, Communists and Trotskyists – one finds some debate and qualification about the nature of laïcité, but certainly nothing like a head-on attack. In fact, in the course of my research, I have only found one writer who criticized the basic principle of laïcité: a contribution to the anarchist weekly Monde libertaire, which was presented even in this publication as a minority opinion.106 One can therefore question this basic premise that laïcité is faced with such a serious onslaught that radical measures are needed in order to defend it.
Attempting to reach a conclusion on such a multifaceted concept like laïcité is difficult. It has been of central importance in the formation of French society. It has worked as a means by which to construct a certain type of modernity, dependent on the evacuation of religious authorities from any integral status within the state and – rather confusingly – it has also created a political space for dialogue between peoples of faith and peoples without faith. More recently, in place of liberty, equality and fraternity, laïcité has become the concept that defines the nature of republicanism. For these reasons, it commands a deep, almost instinctive, sympathy from many French people. However, if one turns to consider how it functions today, the defence of laïcité appears not as the defence of a rational, constitutional principle, but as the construction of an intangible sense of French-ness, in a form which renders the accommodation of new cultures and identities singularly difficult.107 In its current interpretations, it is a cultural ideal which is unsuitable for a world that is increasingly marked by the rapid and easy international transfer of goods, services, ideas and people.
The veil
There is a major problem in discussing this term: the veil does not exist. There is no single Arabic word for this garment, in the form that it is understood by French (and western) commentators.108 And in truth, gentle reader, all my previous references should therefore have been to ‘the veil’ and not to the veil.
Let’s begin our analysis of this term with a true story, from a school in eastern France. An elderly schoolteacher, liked and respected by her colleagues, is beginning her last year before retirement. To her colleagues’ surprise, she appears on the first day of term wearing a Simone de Beauvoir-style bandana. Behind her back, they talk. Obviously, as the teacher in question is French, white and from a laïque family, covering her hair cannot be an indication of her Muslim faith. But why has she adopted it? Is it a fashion statement? Some, mischievously, suggest that she’s been reading too much S de B. Others, more seriously, wonder whether she’s beginning to go bald, and the bandana is to cover up her thinning, grey hair. Someone else points out that women who undergo chemical treatment for cancer often lose their hair: this point creates some sympathy for the teacher in question, but also inhibits her colleagues from directly asking her why she has taken to wearing a bandana. The teacher serves out her last year and leaves. Afterwards, the ‘horrible’ truth becomes known: this woman was a Muslim convert, and her bandana was an expression of her religious commitment.
One question that arises from this is: what is a veil? This is rather like the old philosophical conundrum: does a tree falling in a deserted forest make any noise? Does a piece of cloth that everyone recognizes as a bandana count as a veil? This point explains the difficulty in counting the number of veiled pupils in French schools: who is wearing a bandana, a large beret and an Islamic veil?
Let us now consider some representative statements by French commentators, all of whom participated in the ‘debate’ of 2003–4, concerning the veil and its meanings:
Anne Vigerie and Anne Zelensky: ‘[The veil] symbolises the place of women in Islam as interpreted by Islamism. That place is in the shade: it’s her relegation, her submission to men.’109
Michèle Vianès: ‘[the veil is] … a symbol of degradation … it is a “marker” for discrimination, of sexual apartheid, preventing convergence, and preserving the tutelage of women.’110
Libération: ‘a symbol of oppression’.111
Michel Gauchet: ‘The veil is a religious symbol but, obviously, it’s something else as well. It is fundamentally a sign of the subjection of women, and that’s what causes the problem.’112
François Bayrou: ‘[The veil means that] men and women have a relationship which is not one of equality.’113
Union des familles laïques (The Union of Laïque Families): ‘[The veil is] symbolic of women’s oppression.’114
Raymonde Coudert and Thérèse Filippi: ‘While the turban worn by Sikh boys and the kippa worn by practicing Jewish boys are not signs of sexual subjection, the headscarf is.’115
Martine Billard: ‘[The veil] is, in all cases, either a sign of submission or a sign of alienation.’116
In these quotations, we can see some similarities with the manner in which laïcité is debated. There is the same tendency to make big, abstract, free-standing statements, with no attempt to provide evidence or contextualization, and no reference to the more serious, nuanced analyses of the topic. In this case, there is a surprising consensus among these varied commentators. However, it is important to identify the exact nature of this consensus. These commentators are not saying ‘The rule of the Taliban in Kabul made women’s lives a living hell, and their imposition of the burqa was the most visible sign of their authoritarian and tyrannical power.’ These commentators are not saying ‘The legal enforcement of veil-wearing on women in Saudi Arabia is an essential part of a law code which severely and unjustly oppresses women.’ These commentators are not saying ‘The regulations on veil-wearing in Iran are unjust, and produce a situation in which police authorities harass and humiliate women.’ All these statements are empirically verifiable, politically sensitive and accurate. In the statements by the French commentators, there is a skidding between cause and effect: they sidestep issues of political and religious authority, they ignore context and they invest the veil itself with a particular and eternal meaning. The veil itself, however, is merely a piece of cloth: it has no more meaning than, for example, trousers. It is context which gives it meaning.
What is the origin of this idea that the veil itself is, intrinsically and irremediably, an instrument of women’s oppression? It is not an explanation for its origins. The veil pre-dates Islam, and among the ancient societies that grew up around the Mediterranean it was ‘a mark of exclusivity, status, privilege and privacy’.117 It certainly cannot be found in the Koran. In fact, there is no direct reference to veiling in the Koran, although there is a specific instruction that women should not go topless, and there is a more general injunction that men and women should adopt modest dress. It is from this second reference that the connection between Islam and veiling starts: many Muslims have interpreted ‘modest dress’ to mean veiling. However, there is no implication that modest dress is a means to demonstrate female inferiority: on the contrary, it seems rather a way of affirming women’s legitimate, public presence in society. In passing, we can note that veiling has certainly entered French culture in this way: for centuries, pious Catholic women have been expected to cover their hair in public and even Marianne herself was usually depicted by nineteenth-century illustrators with her hair covered.
Among the French veil-wearing Muslim women of our time, a variety of explanations are given for their choices. Hervé Flanquart conducted a series of in-depth interviews with twenty-five Muslims girls, of whom about half wore the veil. He found that all of them, veiled and unveiled, automatically refuted any element in Islam that seemed to contradict their belief in male–female equality.118 For Sabrina, a 25-year-old law student, wearing a veil was a means to bring her closer to God.119 For another girl, it was a means to surpass the Islam of her father and to find a pride in her Arab identity.120 A third speaks of the veil as a form of vengeance for the suffering that her parents had experienced ‘when they were forced to pray in garages’.121 Commentators close to French Muslims produce a range of interpretations of the veil. Sophie Bessis, born in Tunis and working in France, makes the obvious – but necessary – points that the veil has no single meaning, and that the ‘new veil … is not a return to tradition’.122 Hajji and Marteau, on their journey through Muslim France, present the interesting idea that the new veil carries a new significance: it is a way of asserting a double loyalty, to Islam and to France.123 Gaspard and Khosrokhavar suggest a similar complexity: the new veil-wearers are French and Muslim, modern and veiled, autonomous and dressing in an Islamic manner.124 Halima Zouhar, a Muslim activist, makes a similar comment about the dichotomy-bridging veil: ‘these girls have adopted the emancipated lifestyle so praised by the West, while living according to the precepts of Islam.’125 Caitlin Killian interviewed 100 Muslim women in France. She describes what could be termed ‘the passport veil’: the ability of the veil to act ‘as a way to negotiate between the community of the parents and the French society in which they are immersed’.126 Writing rather more eloquently, Lucette Valensi makes the same point, paraphrasing the typical young veil-wearer as saying ‘father, mother, I am not betraying you. I share your values, and I am taking them to the public world’.127
Researchers working outside France who have interviewed or studied Muslim women have come to similar conclusions: they find a variety of explanations for veiling, but none report that Muslim women choose to veil in order to present themselves as inferior to men. Karin Ask and Marit Tjomsland, in a general review of women’s lives and Islam, stress the heterogeneity of the religion, but also make the simple point that ‘for the individual woman the veil materializes as a public statement of personal commitment’.128 Jenny B. White, studying Islamist women in contemporary Turkey, identifies a ‘new veil’ which can be at once ‘political symbol, marker of modesty and … fashion’.129 While she is aware of the contradictory nature of this symbolism, and of the manner in which the veil can contribute to frustrate women’s aspirations to full political participation, she certainly does not consider that the veil is a symbol of inequality. Meena Dhanda, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, found that the veil worked as ‘a means of seclusion from the rampant materialism of a hyper-commercial culture’;130 while Reina Lewis arrived at almost the opposite conclusion, noting how veil-wearing is developing its own fashion industry.131 Karen Armstrong, a perceptive analyst of religions who was once a veil-wearing nun herself, considers that the new Muslim veil symbolizes ‘resistance to oppression’.132 Jen’nan Ghazal Read and John P. Bartkowski, interviewing Muslim women in Texas, found a sort of internationalism among them. The veil led to ‘a feeling of connectedness with a broader religious community of other veiled Muslim women’.133 The contrast between these analyses and the clichés that circulated among French politicians and in the media is obvious.
Muslim attitudes to the veil vary. One point to stress here is that non-Muslims often overestimate the unity of Muslim thought: in reality, Islam is a religion founded on debate and individual interpretations. A good example of this process is given by Bencheikh, who argues that the original purpose of veiling was to support women and ensure their status in the wider world. That role is now performed by the educational system: therefore Muslims should value the school over the veil.134 Some Muslims refuse such arguments, some accept them. Certainly there are also some female French Muslims who have developed a deep resentment of the veil. Libération carried an interview with one such woman, who stated how she would like to tear the cloth from the heads of all veil-wearing girls: a comment that was used as a headline.135 Abdelwahab Meddeb wrote strongly against veil-wearing, first because he found it a symbol of an ideological Islam, different from the pluralistic Sufi structures that he grew up with, and secondly because today it is a ‘metaphor of sexual inequality’.136 But if we focus our research on the voices of the veil-wearers, we find that while they certainly produce a variety of reasons for their choice of clothing (religion, identity, social status … and fashion?), none of them refer to a belief in female inferiority as a justification. As the veil-wearing Fatima, from Saint-Denis, notes: ‘If my veil is a “symbol of oppression”, am I then supposed to conclude that I’m oppressing myself?’137
The material surveyed in the paragraphs above therefore presents a sharp dichotomy: French veil-wearers produce a set of reasons for their choices, but these are not simply ignored by French political leaders, but even actively denied. Jean-Louis Debré considered that girls advancing modernist or emancipatory arguments in favour of the veil were demonstrating ‘ignorance about the foundations of their own religion’.138 Green deputy Martine Billard considered that ‘whatever these individual interpretations that a minority of young Muslim girls give to the veil, it is in no way a symbol of emancipation’.139 Stasi, to his credit, did note that the veil seemed to have different meanings, but then concluded that the paradigmatic case on which the Republic had to act was the veil as an instrument of oppression.140 Veil-wearing schoolgirls who took seriously the law’s promise of ‘dialogue’ met a similar wall of incomprehension and official arrogance: in September 2004 headteachers stood at the school gates and made snap judgements on their pupils’ clothing, instructing them to push back their bandanas from their foreheads and ears. ‘The law cannot be discussed’ they told those who protested.141 When the veil-wearing Zahra was isolated from her class in Décines (Rhône), she attempted to find out what she could wear to cover her hair that was not considered to be ‘ostensible’. She received an official reply from her local educational authorities: ‘it is for the school administration, and not for the young girl, to decide on the nature of a religious symbol’.142 In Mantes-la-Ville, the school director was even more blunt: ‘Law or no law, it’s me who decides!’143
To return to our previous question, what are the origins of this infallible and exact knowledge of the meaning of the veil that French authorities possess: a knowledge that enables them to state with such ease and such certainty that the veil is and can only be a symbol of female inferiority? It has not been from studying Islam: to my knowledge, no official pronouncement by any Muslim group recommends wearing the veil in order to signal female inferiority. It has not been from reading the works of sociologists and other researchers. While French authorities do give a few references to the situation of women in Iran and Afghanistan, these hardly suggest any serious effort to engage with the complex social dynamics of these countries. Above all, the authorities’ knowledge has not been gained from talking to the veil-wearing girls themselves: one recalls Stasi’s original decision that the veil-wearers were inherently unsuitable for interview. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that this rhetorical certainty is a legacy of French colonialism, whose structures and administrations were consistently based on the idea that French authorities possessed an exact knowledge of the natives’ cultures and lives.144 For these authorities, the idea that they were liberating the natives from the oppression of their own culture was the most convincing justification for their presence.145
One last point needs to be made here: the argument I have presented is that while compulsory veiling is certainly an unacceptable infringement of women’s rights, it is inaccurate to see the veil itself as inherently oppressive. This does not imply that, therefore, I consider the veil to be liberatory, merely that it carries many meanings. If required to define my position, I would describe myself as neutral on this topic: as a general principle, people should be allowed to wear what they wish. If veiling is to be criticized, then it should be on the basis of knowledge, not prejudice. There is no doubt that it is a practice that creates problems for its wearers: if the primary injunction is to dress modestly, then wearing a veil in a Western society seems, on the contrary, a means by which to draw attention to oneself. If it is worn in order to achieve a certain public recognition, then wearers themselves complain about the nature of that recognition: ‘they reduce me to my veil. And what a veil! A veil like a yellow star, an accessory to rape!’146 The simple banning of veils from state schools, however, will not solve these problems.
Integration
To introduce an examination of this term, I wish to refer to an incident in Britain in October 2006. My reasons for briefly changing the area of study are twofold: first, the incident provides an extremely clear example of certain attitudes. But, secondly, it is also a reminder that the problems which beset the French state are not unique: if Britain has managed to avoid some of them, this is only a difference of degree, not an absolute difference in quality.
As many readers will no doubt remember, Jack Straw, then leader of the House of Commons, was visited in his MP’s surgery by a woman wearing a full veil – a niqab – which entirely covered her face. She spoke English well, and had been educated in Lancaster. Perhaps like Chirac considering a veiled schoolgirl, Straw later reported that he felt intimidated, and he asked her to remove her veil. More interesting, he then stated to the press that he considered her veil ‘a barrier to social integration’.147 This is a curious comment: this woman had learnt English, had succeeded in the British school system and had understood the British political system to the extent that she was able to make use of the appropriate administrative and political structures to raise a case with her MP: something which the great majority of the British population never do. In what sense was she ‘not integrated’? At this point British culture comes to resemble French culture: she is described as ‘not integrated’ because she fails to conform to certain assumed norms. And what exactly are these norms? Here British culture grows as vague and cloudy as the speakers in the National Assemblies: those norms are the values of fair play, tolerance, moderation … Perhaps Straw meant that as this woman was wearing a niqab, she would find it difficult to institute the values of fair play by umpiring a cricket match? In truth, these oft-cited values are a remarkably poor summary of the values that govern most British people’s lives, although they may have some relevance as ideals.
Migrants who attempt to accept these lessons concerning ‘our values’ are then trying to live their lives to a set of ideals which the ‘native’ population habitually ignores. Azouz Begag’s political memoirs give countless examples of the moments when, having been characterized as a Muslim and as the child of an immigrant family, he was then required to live to a code of public morality which was more strict than that required for the other ‘native’ French ministers. This double-bind, Catch-22 logic has a demoralizing effect on the person caught in its contradictions. Begag speaks of an almost ‘genetic’ fear.
I was terrified. From father to son, among us, we always have this fear of not being ‘correct’ [comme il faut] in the eyes of the French. We are afraid of hurting others. Afraid of shocking them, of betraying them, disappointing them, of being late. We are afraid of life, of death, of everything. My poor father left to me this genetic agony.148
The examples of Straw’s visitor and Begag’s experiences suggest that we need to rethink the concept of ‘integration’.
A veil-wearing schoolgirl from Rennes observes: ‘They tried to make people believe that we were deviants and that in order to “integrate” us we had to remove our veils. Yet we were extremely well integrated, and taking off our veil was humiliating.’149 Her comments suggest that rather than thinking in terms of a monolithic ‘integration’ process, it would be better to imagine two processes: integration and assimilation. What Straw probably means by ‘not integrated’ is that this woman was ‘not integrated in a form that he considered desirable’. Within this work, I will use ‘integration’ in an entirely value-free sense, to mean a comprehension of the manner in which a society works, or the acquisition of a competence to navigate one’s way through a society, without any cloudy idealization of the values of fair play, toleration, motherhood and apple pie. This process is difficult, but young, ambitious migrants are often able to achieve it. Furthermore, there is the yet more difficult process of assimilation: this is where the question of values becomes important. Here, the migrant makes a choice to ‘become like’: to interiorize the values of the French (or British).
This is central to understanding the public significance of the veil: it is the clearest possible sign of someone who has decided to integrate without assimilating.150
Beurs
Our last key term is less controversial and, to some extent, I include it here simply in order to give information to the non-specialist.
There is a form of French slang known as verlan, based on the approximate inversion of the syllables of a word, which works best for two-syllable words. It is referred to in nineteenth-century novels, such as those of Balzac, and is probably older, for its logic makes most sense in an oral culture, and written examples will inevitably look forced or incomprehensible. Table 1.1 shows some common examples.
Table 1.1: Four French verlan terms
| Orthodox French | Verlan |
| Mec (guy, bloke) | Keum |
| Pourri (rotten, corrupt) | Ripou |
| Juif (Jew) | Fij |
| Arabe | Beur |
One point to stress here is that while these words are a very casual form of slang, they are not insulting. According to legend, verlan was devised by criminals or prisoners to prevent the police from being able to understand their conversations: its purpose was not to offend, but to conceal. In other words, ‘beur’ and ‘fij’ do not belong to that vast litany of hate words which all languages seem to accumulate. On the contrary, it is possible to present a positive reading of ‘beur’: it was a spontaneous creation, which marked the integration of Arab immigrant youth into the structures of French culture. A range of spin-offs evolved: beurette for a young, female Arab, and even beur-geoisie for that strata briefly known in English as Yummies: Young Upwardly Mobile Muslims.
The word beur acquired a political significance, for it is associated with two political movements. The first of these grew out of the banlieues of Lyon, in which a large, second-generation Arab immigrant population was concentrated, and in which there were constant problems of poverty, crime and police harassment.151 An appeal was issued by a local militant, Toumi Djaïja, for a protest march across France, which was rapidly termed ‘La marche des Beurs’. This movement acted as a forum through which the dispossessed beurs of the suburbs could meet middle-class beur professionals. It was through this movement that Fadela Amara first learnt of political organization.152 Mainstream political parties grew interested in this movement, partly because they were genuinely moved by the spectacle of these usually secular, ‘young, generous and apolitical’ marchers,153 whose first demand was entry into the structures of Republic. Robert Castel notes: ‘They felt that they were French, and they knew that they would live in France.’ Their movement marked the end of the old immigrant’s illusion of a ‘return’, one day, to North Africa.154 The parties were also in search of what became known as the ‘Beur vote’: they sought political mechanisms by which immigrant votes could be delivered as elections.155
In December 1984 a new organization was created, SOS-Racisme. This was linked to the Socialist Party and drew together beur militants, anti-racists and young socialists, with the avowed aim of stopping the rise of the anti-immigrant National Front. While this goal was worthy in itself, some aspects of SOS-Racisme’s strategy were less praiseworthy. First, by concentrating solely on the National Front as the source of French racism, it turned attention away from the gentle, moderate, ambient racism that suffuses French society. Secondly, SOS-Racisme’s tactics were often quite patronizing: it is now best remembered for a briefly omnipresent badge, ‘Touche pas à mon pote’ (don’t touch my mate), which was popular among a young, white, liberal audience. Lastly, the movement was firmly controlled by the Socialist Party, which enforced some crucial decisions concerning tactics and leaders.156 There is a fairly well-founded suspicion that the Socialists were primarily interested in SOS-Racisme as a means to win the ‘Beur vote’. Certainly, today, the organization is principally remembered among French Muslim activists as a model of how not to organize politically, and it is hard to point to a single real success it achieved.157 The National Front vote continued to rise in the 1980s and 1990s, no North Africans were elected as deputies (in fact, none have been elected since 1962),158 conditions in the banlieues got worse, and the Beur vote proved to be divided among lines of class and age – just like the rest of the French population.
Even the term ‘beur’ has fallen out of favour. When Michèle Lamont interviewed thirty North African workers in Paris in 1992–3, he found that none of them accepted the term.159 Nasséra, a 19-year-old student interviewed by Bouzar and Kada, disliked the way it reduced a complex reality to a single word.160 One rarely sees it being used by academics or researchers: Geisser and Soum’s volume, published in 2008, is unusual in using it as a principal term of analysis. French Arabs I have talked to tend to shudder when they hear the word: once again, it is not pejorative, but it does sound outdated and even slightly patronizing. Instead, out of the disappointment with SOS-Racisme, a new generation began to look to Islam as a source of identity and values.
Conclusion: the little world of Marie L.
The ‘debate’ on the veil was decided in advance. Given the conceptual vocabulary used by leading politicians and the media there was never any doubt about the final decision of the Stasi Commission, or the ultimate consequences of its report. A revealing glimpse of the sub-culture which it created came to light in July 2004.161 A young woman, whose full name was never revealed, reported that she had been attacked by four North Africans and two black people on a Parisian suburban train line: they told her that they would not allow Jews into their area, they cut off her hair and carved a swastika into her arm. The episode was reported extremely widely on French television and in the press: it was taken as another dreadful example of the innate violence of the immigrant population, whose actions revived the memories of the worst moments of French history. However, almost alone, the police investigating the case were suspicious: no evidence could be found to confirm Marie’s experience. A few days later, she confessed: the whole episode was a fantasy. She had made it up, and was sentenced to four months in prison for making a false accusation. However, a society gets the insanity it deserves. Her sorry melodrama was an accurate reflection of the emotional charge within the case made by Brenner and Stasi: black people and Arabs were not to be trusted. More significantly, a double standard seemed to be operating. Anti-Semitic violence rightly aroused an immediate public revulsion among the media; other acts of racism somehow seemed less important, less central to the debate. Under these circumstances, why was it expected that immigrant families would accept Brenner and Stasi’s protests that the Republic had instituted equality?
The contrast between the meanings ascribed to our two keywords is significant. All politicians loudly proclaim their loyalty to laïcité, but produce wildly divergent interpretations of what this term means. On the other hand, attitudes to the veil are consistent, if inaccurate. In other words, the positive principle, which is supposed to bind together the isolated citizens of the Republic into a united national community, is illusory, a mere politician’s charade, while the negative principle, little more than an expression of educated prejudice, really does provide a type of cultural unity. The implications of this contradiction are extremely serious.
