Sacred Laïcité and the Politics of Religious Resurgence in France: Whither Religious Pluralism?

Abstract

This article contributes to the current scholarly discussion by inviting us to look at secularism not as a static model of religious governance, but as a formation that shifts with time and that is deeply related to our contemporary understanding of religion. As such, it investigates the recent transformations of French secularism. In 2004 France passed a law banning visible religious symbols in public schools. Since then French secularism has increasingly become a sacred – non-negotiable – element of collective life. Drawing on Kim Knott's concept of the ‘secular sacred’, the article investigates, through an analysis of policy reports, law proposals and laws, how this discursive usage of secularism has been used to set apart particular spaces from others: secular spaces that carry the ‘supreme’ values of secularism. In this process, the role of public servants and citizens has been changing, as they have been invested with the responsibility of policing the boundaries of these spaces. New tools, such as charters of secularism, laws and regulations, and state bodies are being imagined to consolidate these boundaries. The article also explores how ‘religious resurgence’ (and more specifically ‘Islamic resurgence’) has been essential to this ‘sacred-making’ activity: to give substance to values that are non-negotiable and need to be separated from those that are not. Overall, the piece posits, in line with other recent works, that sacred-making is not reserved to the ‘religious’, but can become a central component of how secularism gets articulated and deployed. In so doing, it underscores the importance of documenting how meanings given to secularism shift to grasp the politics that underpin discourses on religious resurgence.

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellowship. I am indebted to Jeffrey Haynes, Guy Ben-Porat and an anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful comments on drafts of this article, and to Kim Knott for taking the time to introduce me to her work.

Please note that I translated into English the quotes in the article taken from French policy reports. I bear sole responsibility for any shortcomings.

Notes

¹ The complete debate can be watched online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = TJ3zCh5qt48 (accessed 3 December 2012).

² Ahmet Kuru discusses in detail this convergence between the French Left and Right. He argues that while the Left and Right were divided over the level of state intervention in religious affairs, the headscarf debate led to an unprecedented coalition between those parties. This coalition became important after the 2002 presidential election that saw a rise of the far right, where the mainstream Right started to actively support headscarf bans and other non-accommodating positions to appeal to a far right electorate opposed to immigration and Islam (Kuru, 2008: 14; Kuru & Stepan, 2012: 107).

³ While the 1960s in France were marked by an important immigration of individuals (most of whom were identified as belonging to the Islamic faith) from former colonies, they were considered to be temporary workers until the 1970s. With the oil and economic crisis in 1973–74, the French government decided to put an end to large-scale immigration and to facilitate family reunification. These years therefore marked a shift in the sociological profile of migrants from a male dominated population to one consisting of nuclear and extended families settling down in France (Laurence & Vaisse, 2006: 16–17).

⁴ As this article argues, the meaning of laïcité is not fixed, but changes in relation to both time and context. Nevertheless, it is important to note that scholars, including Kuru (2007) and Hurd (2008), have identified two dominant/ideal types of secularism: laicism (Hurd, 2008) or assertive secularism (Kuru, 2007), and Judeo-Christian secularism (Hurd, 2008) or passive secularism (Kuru, 2007). French laïcité is understood as belonging to the first type, in which the state actively intervenes in religion to push it out of the public realm. This is quite different from the second type, whereby the state is not actively expelling religion from public life (Kuru, 2007: 571).

⁵ It is important to note that while laws, law proposals and regulations around religion are generally formulated in a broad way to avoid explicitly targeting a religion in particular, examples of ‘problematic’ practices used in public and policy debates to illustrate the importance of these regulations refer almost systematically to Islamic practices.

⁶ Gianni's (2005) article documents a similar shift in secular public hospitals in Geneva, Switzerland. He argues that while hospitals used to reach informal agreements with students wearing headscarf allowing them to do their internships in their facilities, once those agreements became public through media coverage, they started to be constructed as ‘problematic’ and infringing on the secularity and cohesion of hospitals.

⁷ Hurd makes a similar argument with respect to discourses that focus solely on religious freedom, whereby religion becomes understood in those tropes as the principal source of conflict (Hurd, 2012).

⁸ Knott (2010: 126) defines this concept as follows: ‘We have coined the term “secular sacred” to refer to non-negotiable matters of belief and value that do not derive from formally religious sources but that occur within the domain of “non-religion”’.

⁹ Note that secularism was mostly understood in terms of its relation to Christianity, which explains the persistent use of the expression: ‘separation of church and state’.

¹⁰ This article adopts a similar reading of religion, and Islam more specifically. In other words, rather than working with a fixed reading of Islam and Islamic dogmas, I am more interested in the interplay between secular discourses and religion. That is in understanding how secular discourses in the contemporary French context can define the boundaries of what is an acceptable Islamic practice and what is not, and how these boundaries shift with time.

¹¹ A similar reflection is developed as well for the constructed boundaries between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ realm. This is an issue that has been discussed in the work of feminist scholars, such as Yuval-Davis (1997), Kandiyioti (1991) and Gal (2004) (see also Knott, 2010).

¹² Note the influence of Durkheim here (1976). This influence is discussed further in Knott (2005).

¹³ I use the term laïcité in my work. Although it can be translated as secularism, it remains quite specific to the French context. Several authors have expressed concerns with regard to translating it as secularism, as they believe it only partially reflects the meaning of laïcité (Troper, 2000; Bowen, 2007, 2010).

¹⁴ The documents studied include the Rossinot Report published in 2006 that focused on the implementation of laïcité in public services and which was commissioned by the president (at the time Nicolas Sarkozy) of the French right-wing political party, Union for a Popular Movement, for the 100-year anniversary of the 1905 separation law; the High Council of Integration (HCI) opinions on religious expressions and laïcité in public services (2010a) and in businesses (2011), the HCI Charter of laïcité (2007, 2010b); the Laborde Law proposal on extending neutrality to private structures that welcome minors (2012) and the legislative report produced by the French Senate before this law was voted by this body (Richard, 2011).

¹⁵ The term neutrality, mentioned extensively in policy documents, is used with quotation marks to indicate that this paper, along with the works of others, implicitly interrogates this notion. Note 17 and the conclusion of this article discuss in greater detail some of the reasons why this notion is being criticized.

¹⁶ Note that over the last two years there have been a couple of controversial cases, in which fasting during Ramadan while working with children in day-camps has been considered to be a ‘problematic’ practice. As such, day-camp directors have asked their employees to break their fast on the ground that fasting was a breach of their contract as it could infringe on their ability to ensure the security of the children they were responsible for (CCIF, 2012).

¹⁷ One understands here why and on which grounds the concept of neutrality has been criticized. Danchin (2011) has argued that it is based on a Christian reading of religion, where ‘modern’ religion is understood as being a belief located in one's conscience. Other scholars informed by a feminist perspective have argued that the baseline around which this neutrality has been articulated is a white, bourgeois male (Salih, 2009: 421; Scott, 2007: 169), which explains why women who have for a long time been depicted as being unable to abstract themselves from their sex, and thus become neutral, have and continue to pose a challenge to this concept (see Scott, 2007; Hurd, 2013).

¹⁸ In fact, religion can be present in public spaces, as long as it remains a private belief only. This position, noted in note 15, is deeply influenced by a Christian understanding of religion. This will be discussed further in the conclusion of the article.

¹⁹ The HCI was created in 1989 by the French prime minister. Its mission is to give opinions and make suggestions on issues related to the integration of foreigners or citizens of foreign origins. As of 2012, it has also become officially responsible for providing guidance on the implementation of laïcité in the Republic. This is discussed in the last section of the article. For more information see: http://www.hci.gouv.fr

²⁰ The extension of this neutrality requirement to mothers accompanying their children on school outings was first raised when the 2004 law was implemented in schools (Barras, 2009, 2011). This extension has until 2012 been characterized by its ad hoc character, depending on schools and headmasters. In March 2012 a nationwide notice with instructions for the 2012–13 school year was circulated to all schools, in which the Ministry of National Education confirmed the possibility of extending this principle to parents participating in school outings (Ministry of National Education, 2012). As this was a measure put in place before the 2012 presidential elections, it remains unclear whether it will be followed through by the new government.

²¹ The document is available on the HCI website at: http://www.hci.gouv.fr/Charte-de-la-laicite-dans-les.html (accessed 17 October 2012).

²² The Stasi report was released in 2003 by the Commission Stasi put in place to evaluate whether a ban on visible religious symbols in public school was required.

²³ This mission for the year 2012 selected two central topics of reflection: religious expressions and laïcité in businesses, and laïcité in universities (HCI, 2011: 4).

²⁴ This law is officially known as the law of separation between ‘churches’ and state, and not of religion and state. It is important to understand that the main aim of this law at the time was to establish a separation between Catholicism and the state, thus separating Catholic ‘churches’ from the state. In fact, this law is understood as being one of the pillars of French laïcité, although here again its interpretation changes as a function of who refers to it, as well as the political context in which it is mobilized.

²⁵ Concretely Islam is in this context considered to be compatible with the Republic as long as it takes the form of a private belief that stays in one's conscience, however it becomes subject to scrutiny and limitations when it takes the form of a visible practice.

²⁶ This remark echoes Erin Wilson's (2012) argument, in which she invites us to be more self-aware of the role that religion (in particular Christianity) continues to play in public life, even if this public life is understood as not being influenced by religion.

²⁷ Danchin (2011) discusses the implications of this reading of religion for judgments of the European Court of Human Rights related to questions of religious freedom and Islam in France and Turkey. These reflections are valid as well for the current French national context that seems to be increasingly promoting a reading of religious freedom based on beliefs.

²⁸ This case is known as the Baby-Loup daycare case. For more details on the case see Richard (2011: 8–10).