Confronting the politics of denial

In the summer of 2021, a series of posters produced by the Ministère de l’éducation nationale appeared on advertising spaces across France. They showed white and non-white students together in various educational and sporting settings with slogans that appeared to highlight a causal link between diversity and laïcité. ‘Permettre à Mihan et Aliyah de rire aux mêmes histoires, c’est ça la laïcité.’ ‘Permettre à Sacha et Neissa d’être dans le même bain, c’est ça, la laïcité’ (Ministère de l’Éducation nationale 2021). The posters appeared to be saying that it was laïcité that facilitated the integration of non-white students. Jean-Louis Bianco, former president of the Observatoire de la laïcité, a body criticised for not presenting a rigorous enough defence of laïcité and eventually dissolved that same summer, summed up widespread disquiet,

On renvoie aux enfants ce message: ‘Toi, tu n’es pas comme les autres parce que tu n’as pas la même couleur de peau, tu n’as pas la même religion.’ […] La conclusion qu’on en tire, c’est que la laïcité permet aux enfants issus de la diversité d’être des enfants comme les autres et que sans la laïcité ils n’y arriveraient pas. (Rey-Bethbeder 2021)

Along with an implicit message about race, transmitted via names and images, there appeared to be a silently transmitted message about religion, or religious symbols, whose absence was presumably also the achievement of laïcité. Render your faith invisible and then you can play, read and find friendship like this, too.

Faced with criticism that his ministry’s campaign had presented laïcité as something for non-white students, Jean-Michel Blanquer argued that, ‘comme pour n’importe quelle affiche, il y a une variété de couleurs de peau différentes, je n’y fais même pas attention’ (Vasseur 2021). This ‘nothing-to-see-here’ colour-blindness, however disingenuous, is an important component of France’s ‘négation institutionnalisée de la race’ (Niang 2020, 192), a state-sponsored politics of denial that contributes to the maintenance of racial inequality by masking it.

Colour-blind repudiations of race have proven as durable as the myth of state neutrality in matters of religion. The ongoing weaponisation of laïcité continues to foster an environment in which the far right is able to flourish. In 2022, it achieved the highest vote in its history. Marine Le Pen’s 13 million votes in the second round of the presidential election made a mockery of the vow made by Emmanuel Macron after his 2017 victory to ensure there was no longer a reason to vote for ‘extremes’ (Le Point, 8 May 2017). Two far-right candidates, Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, shared nearly a third of all first-round votes cast. Le Pen’s Rassemblement National pledged to remove basic democratic rights from foreigners living in France: the children of immigrants born and residing in France would no longer be guaranteed access to citizenship, and French citizens would be given priority access to jobs and social housing (Le Pen 2022).

Arun Kundnani has noted how political conflicts generated by neoliberalism are displaced ‘onto the more comfortable terrain of clashes of culture’, projecting ‘complex fears, tensions and anxieties’ onto ‘racisms of the border, of law and order, and of counter-terrorism’ (Kundnani 2021). Zemmour has become a crude embodiment of this kind of projection. During the presidential campaign he earned a third conviction for racist hate speech, having labelled unaccompanied child migrants ‘violeurs’, ‘assassins’ and ‘voleurs’ (Le Monde, 17 January 2022). The Great Replacement conspiracy theory remains the centrepiece of his platform (Noiriel 2019), regardless of the number of terrorist atrocities it inspires. His relentless anti-Muslim onslaught, now into its second decade, castigates a Muslim ‘invasion’ (Le Monde, 20 December 2022) that has turned areas like Seine-Saint-Denis into ‘enclaves étrangères … sous le règne d’Allah’ (Zemmour 2021). Islam is presented as being incompatible with France and Muslims should be made to choose between the two (Causeur, 17 January 2017). France is purportedly suffering from a ‘colonisation religieuse’ which in turn entails ‘une colonisation visuelle’ and ‘une colonisation des âmes’ (Zemmour 2021).

Such rhetoric underlines Raymond Taras’s argument that, ‘Racialization, race and differential racism have all become more endemic to Islamophobic stigmatizing of Muslims today than was the case in the past’, with debate over national identity, migration and multiculturalism focusing less on ‘civic identity’ than on ‘primordial, civilizational and racial differences’ (Taras 2013).

The ongoing resurgence of the far right is one consequence of several decades of obsessive stigmatisation of Muslims in France, of a remarkable, reactionary fascination with their clothes, food, hair and historic tweets. A public outburst by Yves Thréard, deputy director of Le Figaro, provided an example of the kind of bigotry animating this obsession among political and media elites. Affirming on a late-night television debate that ‘L’islamophobie, ça n’existe pas’, he revealed that he was in the habit of getting off boats or buses if another passenger was wearing a hijab, before exclaiming, ‘Je déteste la religion musulmane! On a le droit de détester une religion, on a tout à fait le droit de le dire’ (Le Grand soir, LCI, 14 October 2019).

In his capacity as France’s Défenseur des droits, or human rights ombudsman, Jacques Toubon, a former general secretary of the Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), provided a rare counterpoint to this trajectory. His report, ‘Discriminations et origines: l’urgence d’agir’, sounded the alarm over the ‘dimension systémique’ of discrimination against French citizens of foreign origin, warning that this was jeopardising the basic rights of millions of people when it came to unemployment, poverty, housing, health, education and treatment by the police, and calling for urgent action. ‘Comment est-il possible’, the report asked, ‘qu’il n’existe plus aucune véritable politique publique dédiée à la lutte contre les discriminations raciales?’ The question of identity, it observed, seemed to have supplanted that of equality in public debate (Défenseur des droits 2020, 5, 6). Politicians charged with combating discrimination and seeking the inclusion of marginalised populations in the name of Republican equality were instead constantly reminding these populations of their shortcomings when it came to meeting Republican demands. Here the report highlighted the use of terms like ‘communautarisme’ and ‘séparatisme’ in ‘les discours officiels relatifs à l’organisation de la religion musulmane’ (Défenseur des droits 2020, 44).

Official proclamations on the subject of race and Islamophobia have generally tended to oscillate between appeasement of far-right themes, notably in the form of legislation targeting ‘separatism’, discussed at length in this issue, and denial, which began to take on a more authoritarian dimension, alongside the usual incantatory professions of colour-blindness. Suppression of the word race, as Brun and Cosquer note, does not suppress racism (Brun and Cosquer 2022, 125). In 2018 deputies in the Assemblée Nationale had done precisely this, on the grounds that the word was outdated and disproven by science, voting unanimously to remove it from the French constitution and replacing the promise that all citizens were equal before the law ‘sans distinction d’origine, de race ou de religion’, with a commitment to equality regardless of sex, origin or religion (Bessone 2020, 2021/2).

Denial of Islamophobia took a more aggressive turn under Macron. The Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France (CCIF) played an important role in collecting data on Islamophobic acts, investigating them and providing legal support to those facing discrimination. In a move that Amnesty International warned might threaten freedom of association, the government simply dissolved it (Amnesty International 2020). A rhetorical offensive was launched by the president and his ministers against organisations and intellectuals who engaged with ‘imported’ notions like critical race theory, and who were deliberately setting traps for the descendants of immigrants from North or sub-Saharan Africa, leading them to ‘revisiter leur identité par un discours post-colonial ou anti-colonial’ (Macron 2020). Frédérique Vidal, the minister for higher education, claimed that activist academics were preventing others from doing research: ‘Moi je pense que l’islamo-gauchisme gangrène la société dans son ensemble et que l’université n’est pas imperméable, l’université fait partie de la société’. She called on one of the world’s leading research institutions, the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), to conduct an inquiry into the role of ‘Islamo-gauchisme’ in academia (Le Monde, 16 February 2021). The CNRS was dismissive, refuting the term and condemning in particular, ‘les tentatives de délégitimation de différents champs de la recherche, comme les études postcoloniales, les études intersectionnelles ou les travaux sur le terme de “race”, ou tout autre champ de la connaissance’ (CNRS 2021).

The attempt to discredit academics conducting research on questions of discrimination even impacted on the election of a successor to the disgraced president of the Fondation National des Sciences Politiques, Olivier Duhamel. An anonymous article on the Observatoire du décolonialisme website, a body dedicated to fighting ‘les idéologies identitaires’, sought to undermine one of the candidates, Nonna Mayer, on the grounds that she was guilty of giving credibility to the notion of ‘islamophobie’ (Libération, 19 March 2021). In a similar vein, a manifesto by 100 academics had backed the government’s stance, condemning the importation of ‘idéologies communautaristes anglo-saxonnes’ and, more specifically, ‘Les idéologies indigéniste, racialiste et “décoloniale”’. Such ideas were feeding ‘une haine des “blancs” et de la France’ (Collectif 2020). A study by Patrick Simon and Juliette Galonnier put the issue in perspective. It surveyed articles published over six decades in fifteen social science journals and found that those dealing with the question of race accounted for a mere 2% of all publications, rising to 3% between 2015 and 2020 (Roux and Perrenot 2021).

Signatories to a letter of solidarity with anti-racist academics located the furore as ‘part of a global trend in which racism is protected as freedom of speech, while to express antiracist views is regarded as a violation of it’ (Lentin and Co 2021). The government, meanwhile, was less concerned with scientific reality by this point. At the President’s request, a ‘Charte des principes pour l’Islam de France’ had been drawn up that explicitly repudiated the notion that the state could be held responsible for anti-Muslim acts, denouncing the concept of racisme d’état as defamatory (CFCM 2021).

As Reza Zia-Ebrahimi notes, ‘Islamophobia denial is not a French specificity’, since it exists all over the world. It is, however, ‘a French speciality’:

Islamophobia denial is prevalent to the point of finding its way into dictionaries of racism […] and the official policies of anti-racist organizations. In France, the use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ carries a higher cost for activists and academics than elsewhere. Those invoking the term are perceived as passive abettors if not active accomplices of violent jihadism. As such, the magnitude of Islamophobia denial in France genuinely sets the country apart. (Zia-Ebrahimi 2020)

Overview of articles

This special issue draws on expertise from Britain and France to engage with a phenomenon that remains a subject of concern internationally. It builds on the important recent contributions in the field, notably the French Cultural Studies special issue on ‘Islamophobia, racialisation and the “Muslim problem” in France’ (Dawes 2021) and the Ethnic and Racial Studies special issue on ‘Fighting discrimination in a colour-blind context: the case of France’ (Escafré-Dublet, Guiraudon and Talpin 2023). The publication of this volume thus demonstrates the growing momentum in the interdisciplinary study of structural anti-Muslim discrimination in the spheres of law, public policy, media discourse and cultural production and their intensification during the Macron era. Indeed, although debates about the place of Islam and Muslims in France are not new, we argue that Islamophobia—defined here as anti-Muslim discrimination directed at those claiming to be or perceived to be Muslim—has become a powerful political instrument under the Macron presidency. We call this phenomenon ‘political Islamophobia’ in so far as it describes scenarios whereby generalised suspicion of French Muslims can be mobilised by political actors to discredit, marginalise, or silence the voices of those who seek to draw attention to the singular experiences of Muslim citizens in France.

The opening article ‘Decolonial approaches to laïcité as a mode to re-think contemporary Islamophobia’ by Nadia Kiwan shows how, over the last decade, we have witnessed the reinforcement of laïcité as a mode of governance which increasingly focuses on France’s Muslim citizens. The article problematises three ideal-type conceptualisations of laïcité from a decolonial perspective and considers the historical contexts which have influenced contemporary understandings of laïcité by examining broader processes of colonisation and secularisation during the nineteenth century. In particular, Kiwan argues that a decolonised conceptualisation of laïcité can be an illuminating analytical tool in relation to Islamophobia and political conflicts surrounding the emergence of Muslim and anti-racist feminism via a discussion of the association Lallab.

Jim Wolfreys’s article ‘Avec Vous? Islamophobia and the Macron presidency’ invites readers to consider how we get from the law of ‘separation’ (of the state and the churches in 1905) to the law on ‘separatism’ in 2021. His article reflects on the radicalisation of laïcité discourse under the Macron presidency through the development of public policy designed to counter so-called Islamist ‘separatism’. Wolfreys shows how the Macron neoliberal project mobilises an authoritarian conception of laïcité in order to police and delineate the boundaries of ‘Frenchness’, with French Muslims being subjected to ever-increasing scrutiny and stigmatisation as a result of the Loi confortant le respect des principes de la République or so-called ‘separatism law’.

The impact of the 2021 separatism law on the fundamental civil and political rights of French Muslims is taken up in the third article in this special issue: ‘La loi contre le séparatisme: mort et résurrection d’une “justice d’exception”’ by Fatima Khemilat. Khemilat provides detailed analysis of the legislation and demonstrates how it constrains five freedoms: freedom of religious conscience, association, expression, education and enterprise. She also shows how the strategic vagueness of the very notion of separatism in legal terms reinforces the logic of ‘une justice d’exception’ for a ‘corps d’exception’ and a shift from a patrolling of the public sphere to a ‘territorialised surveillance’ of the private lives of Muslims living in France’s banlieues.

Moving from Khemilat’s comprehensive overview of the extensive reach of the 2021 separatism law, the next article in the volume—Ibrahim Bechrouri’s ‘“L’esprit de défense”: separatism, counterinsurgency and the dissolution of the Collective against Islamophobia in France’—focuses on one specific consequence of Macron’s policy on so-called Islamist separatism, namely the dismantling of the Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (CCIF) in late 2020. Bechrouri shows how the organisation’s sustained awareness-raising regarding systemic Islamophobia was dismissed by the Macron administration, which in turn argued that in invoking the very notion of institutional Islamophobia, the CCIF was inciting terrorist acts against French public institutions and their employees. Bechrouri argues that the tactics employed by the Macron government in the ‘cancelling’ of the CCIF as an Islamist separatist organisation, despite its well-respected status as an anti-racist organisation across France and Europe, resembled counter-insurgency operations used during the Algerian war of independence. Bechrouri’s analysis therefore points to a transhistorical phenomenon whereby Islam and Muslims have been regarded as internal enemies in both colonial and post-colonial contexts and whereby the rule of law is sidelined in favour of the militarisation of governance.

Counterinsurgency is similarly the focus of Fraser McQueen’s article, which draws on critical terrorism studies to analyse two feature films, Ne m’abandonne pas (Duringer 2016) and Le Ciel attendra (Mention-Schaar 2016), which he argues reflect the broader discursive environment in which the state repression of Muslims and civilian-led counterterrorism have been normalised. McQueen shows how both films engage with and showcase former government advisor Dounia Bouzar’s concept of ‘deradicalisation’ to counter the ‘embrigadement’ of young French individuals by transnational jihadist networks based in Syria. The conception of radicalisation as being a purely individual process means that the state is able to ‘outsource’ counterterrorism to the individual citizen, since it excludes itself from any responsibility concerning the flight of French-born citizens to Isis-controlled Syria. In this scenario, the state only intervenes as a ‘carceral’ agent, which interpellates its citizens into becoming the foot-soldiers of ‘une société de surveillance’ (Castaner cited in McQueen).

The hostile environment of such a ‘société de surveillance’ is a theme which is also taken up in Olivier Esteves’s article, entitled ‘France, you love it but leave it: the silent flight of Muslim French people’. Esteves shows that against the background of Islamophobia which peaked in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks, evidence has been mounting that a growing number of French Muslims have been leaving the country. The article explores the findings of a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews with Muslim French who have decided to leave France for destinations as diverse as Montreal, London, Geneva, Brussels, Dubai, New York or Istanbul. Esteves’s article establishes a clear link between chronic experiences of Islamophobic stigmatisation and discrimination amongst highly skilled and qualified French Muslims and their decision to emigrate.

Such experiences of stigmatisation mark the starting point for Malika Hamidi’s article, which considers the formation of ‘un post-féminisme musulman’ in contemporary France. In ‘Françaises, féministes et musulmanes: L’identité impossible?’, Hamidi shows how the repeated affaires de foulards from 1989 onwards have formed the backdrop for the emergence of this movement, which makes both a theological and political contribution to debates about Muslim women’s fundamental rights. Hamidi’s ‘état présent’ essay provides an overview of some key aspects of the emerging interdisciplinary field of research which focuses on the gendered dimensions of Islamophobia and their impact on French Muslim feminist movements. Hamidi’s piece thus draws attention to potential themes for future research in this area.

The final contribution to this special issue takes the form of an interview with French sociologist and anthropologist Nacira Guénif Souilamas (Université Paris 8). In the interview, Kiwan and Wolfreys invite Guénif to reflect on the ways in which Islamophobia is regarded with scepticism in France and the difficulties that this presents for the formation of an effective political anti-racism across the various political movements of the left and across the generations. The interview also involves a discussion of the ways in which those who carry out research on Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism are often marginalised and silenced within the French academy and the challenges that this presents for resisting the politics of denial referred to above. For Guénif, then, the possibility of resistance to Islamophobia as a form of structural racism and the marginalisation of those activists and academics who evoke Islamophobia in contemporary France is dependent on a dismantling of the hierarchies and power dynamics at play within contemporary knowledge production. We hope that this special issue makes a small contribution to that endeavour.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Gill Allwood and Martin O'Shaughnessy for inviting us to co-edit this special issue and are grateful to Oliver Davis for overseeing the process to its conclusion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).