Introduction
In her manifesto for the 2017 French Presidential Election campaign, Front National leader Marine Le Pen vowed to make the Republican school an ‘inviolable asylum where … quarrels do not enter … thus imposing not only laïcité, but also neutrality and security’ (Rassemblement National, 2017: 16). This statement, accompanied by her promised ban on the wearing of religious signs in universities and other public spaces, is representative of a larger and longer-term shift in the discourses of laïcité, or state secularism, across the French political spectrum since 1989. That year in France marked the beginning of l’affaire du voile islamique, or the Islamic Veil Affair, as three female Muslim students in the commune of Creil were suspended for refusing to remove their headscarves in class. The local story and its aftermath sparked off nationwide debates and a series of legislative measures that transformed the meaning of laïcité in the three decades that followed.
As the Affair produced two major laws in the 2000s – the Law of 15 March 2004 banning ostentatious religious symbols in public schools, and the Law of 11 October 2010 prohibiting face covering in public –, a rich body of English-language scholarship emerged on France’s changing laïcité narratives in the face of Islam. This literature touched upon themes such as gender, immigration, discrimination, and political realignments in various case studies (Bowen, Reference Bowen2007; Scott, Reference Scott2007) and comparisons (Laxer, Reference Laxer2019). Simultaneously, the post-1989 period in France also witnessed the rapid rise of far-right populist politics under the flagship of Front National (FN) – or Rassemblement National (RN) since June 2018 –, an initially fringe movement that became a political powerhouse with its ultranationalist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim rhetoric. While there is an extensive literature recognising the burgeoning weight of right-wing populism in France’s political landscape (Shields, Reference Shields2007; Stockemer, Reference Stockemer2017), research on the particular relationship between the FN and the country’s changing laïcité narratives is only beginning to make headway, especially in light of Marine Le Pen’s wholehearted championing of the concept since 2011 (Nilsson, Reference Nilsson2019; Almeida, Reference Almeida2017).
To contribute to the understanding of the populism-secularism connection, this article discusses the political impact of right-wing populism on the transformation of laïcité discourses in France since 1989. Focusing on education policy as a case study, the article puts forward two main arguments. First, I argue that the FN has contributed to an increased securitisation of mainstream laïcité narratives in the past three decades. By securitisation, I refer to the FN’s systematic targeting of the Muslim minority as a potential threat to the ‘people’, which facilitated the broader reframing of laïcité as a Republican defence mechanism, operating particularly through the school system. Centre-right and centre-left parties such as Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) and Parti socialiste (PS) selectively co-opted and reformulated the securitisation narrative in their competition with the FN’s rising political profile since the 1990s. In the particular domain of education, laïcité has been placed in a securitising narrative to address two interrelated concerns: the immediate safety of the Republican school by the promotion of neutrality, and the overall wellbeing of the Republic through the integration of immigrants and the prevention of radicalisation.
Second, I underline that the impact of the FN’s populism on the political establishment has not been one-sided, but there was rather a reciprocal relationship. As mainstream parties partially incorporated the FN’s securitisation of Islam in their platforms, the FN itself went through a process of mainstreaming in the 2000s by claiming ownership of laïcité as part of its anti-immigrant rhetoric. Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, the party joined the laïcité race by pushing for a more exclusionary, identity-based interpretation of the concept as a way to wrap anti-Muslim resentments in a more palatable Republican rhetoric. Reclaiming and redefining laïcité has been a primary tool for the ‘normalisation’ of the FN’s far-right populist themes, termed as dédiabolisation (de-demonisation) in French academic and political debates (Dézé, Reference Dézé, Crépon, Dézé and Mayer2015).
Education policy is arguably the finest barometer for gauging the trajectory of laïcité. Since the Jules Ferry Laws of the 1880s that secularised public schools, education in France has always been the primary site of contention for the secular and the Catholic imaginaries of the nation. In the Fifth Republic, the Debré Law of 1959, which facilitated state subsidies for Catholic private schools, or the failed Savary Bill in 1984, seeking to create a unified secular public education system, exemplified those two visions and generated major public protests and heated disputes. It was thus fitting that the Islamic Veil Affair would break out in the school, perceived traditionally as the bastion of the secular Republic. As France’s Haute conseil à l’intégration (High Council of Integration) aptly put it in a 2007 report, ‘the principle of laïcité … is certainly not limited to the sole domain of the school, although … the school has been and remains a privileged space of application, and of confrontations’ (HIC, 2007: 24).
Methodological approach
Outlining the transformation of laïcité discourses since 1989, the article employs a methodology that combines qualitative content analysis and historical narrative. The content analysis draws on an array of primary sources that focus on, but are not limited to, the FN. In addition to consulting the existing scholarly works on the topic, the primary data include political party documents, declarations of leaders and intellectuals, newspaper articles, government reports, court decisions, and parliamentary debates. The documents used in the analysis are selected from a larger set of online and offline material via purposive sampling based on pertinence, historical significance, and representativeness (Neuendorf, Reference Neuendorf2017). Complementarily, historical narrative allows placing the data in social and political context with particular attention to temporal relationships and multiple sources of causality. It offers a sequential description of events and processes that involve key actors and institutions with a view to ‘sorting through the available evidence and attempting to reconstruct causal scenarios’ (Lange, Reference Lange2013: 15). Accordingly, I present a focused sequential narrative that underscores the influence of the far right on laïcité discourses in education, yet this is by no means to suggest a unidirectional or monocausal explanatory framework (more on that below).
The arguments proceed in two sections divided by a periodisation of this recent historical episode. The first period (1989–2004) covers the interval between the outbreak of the Veil Affair and the Law of 2004 banning religious symbols in public schools. The second period (2005–2019) marks the FN’s gradual integration of laïcité in its anti-immigrant rhetoric – a concept that the party mostly avoided in the earlier period. Highlighting the FN factor in these two periods, the article does not propose singling out the far right as the only variable determining the increased securitisation of laïcité narratives in the French education system, nor do I claim to measure the precise degree of such an impact. While there have certainly been other domestic and international influences, my purpose here is to demonstrate that, although the FN never held national power, there is ample evidence to suggest that it influenced established parties in the securitised reconstructions of laïcité discourses and policies in the last thirty years. The argument thus speaks to the literature on populist ‘contagion’, which holds that the advance of populist movements ‘has caused mainstream parties and governments to adopt more restrictive policies’ in domains such as welfare, immigration, and public safety (Norris and Inglehart, Reference Norris and Inglehart2019: 23; see also Carvalho, Reference Carvalho2014). Education has not been a prioritised policy domain in the ‘contagion’ literature, which this article explores.
Furthermore, I do not contend that the post-1989 period was the first time that laïcité was placed in a securitising framework in France. As early as the 1880s, the founders of the laïque school justified their initiative as a way to protect the survival of the Republic against the intrusions of the Catholic establishment (Peker, Reference Peker2019). What is new in the three decades that followed the Veil Affair, however, is that the securitisation of laïcité targeted not a historically established powerful religious institution, but a religious minority that arrived relatively recently into French territory. Finally, the inner workings of France’s policymaking processes, or the consequences of such policies fall beyond the scope of this article. Instead, the focus is on the broader shift in ‘policy paradigms’ in the identified period – that is, the transformation of ideational and normative frameworks that inform policy agendas (Hogan and Howlett, Reference Hogan and Howlett2015). In what follows, the article begins with a theoretical discussion on right-wing populism and the rise of a securitisation outlook towards Muslims in the West. It then moves on to the sequential analysis of the two periods with special attention to education policy. The concluding section discusses the larger implications of right-wing populism for religion, secularity, and social policymaking in the twenty-first century.
Theorising populism and securitisation
Much ink has been spilt on the rise of right-wing populist discourses in the Western world, resting on a tripartite relationship between the righteous yet underprivileged ‘people’ and the corrupt ‘elite’, which is viewed to be in alliance with malevolent ‘others’ to deprive the real people of their essential rights, values, and wellbeing (Moffit, Reference Moffit2016). Although often not religiously motivated or approved by the Church establishment, European populists utilise Christianity as an implicit national/civilisational identity marker to deepen the contrast between ‘the people’ and the Muslim ‘other’ (Brubaker, Reference Brubaker2017). Marine Le Pen, for instance, despite having long dropped the explicitly Catholic rhetoric of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, uses religion as a cultural resource to highlight the people as Christian-origin (and White) French citizens, the elites as the ‘multiculturalist’ or ‘globalist’ mainstream parties and media, and the others as the Muslim minority that pushes a ‘communitarian’ agenda that threatens national unity (Roy, Reference Roy, Marzouki, McDonnell and Roy2016).
As Norris and Inglehart (Reference Norris and Inglehart2019: 76) note, the emphasis on ‘security’ is a key strategic tool for populist politics, which continually incites ‘an exaggerated fear of ‘outsiders’ – especially foreigners and immigrants – and … threats to national identities from different cultures’. Securitisation involves the discursive process whereby an issue is transferred from the realm of ‘politics as usual’ to the domain of imminent danger and existential threat, thus rendering public policy deliberation and rule of law secondary concerns (Emmers, Reference Emmers and Collins2019). Especially after September 11, far right populist parties have contributed to the increased securitisation of Islam in the West, framing Muslim groups, symbols, and practices as suspicious and potentially dangerous for the cultural and material survival of the nation/civilisation (Croft, Reference Croft2012).
The securitisation of Islam is not solely about speech acts in public debates; it is also ‘grounded in subtle changes of mainstream policies or bureaucracies’ beyond the police and the military (Cesari, Reference Cesari2012: 433). The logic of securitisation often spills over to various policy domains where the civil liberties of the securitised minority can be undermined on account of their suspected threat to the polity. One such domain is education policy. Scholars of education have long noted the ‘hidden curriculum’ involved in modern school systems, which is closely linked to securitisation discourses because of the ascribed role of schools to integrate securitised minorities and prevent radicalisation and extremism (Davies, Reference Davies2016). For right-wing populist and authoritarian movements in particular, education is often attributed a particular responsibility as the chief instrument of conservative restoration (Akbaba and Jeffrey, Reference Akbaba and Jeffrey2017).
This holds true for the case of France. In the early days of the modern French far right, the secularisation of Republican education in the 1880s and the Law of 1905 separating the churches and the state have been customarily seen as the defeat of Catholic France by liberal, degenerate forces (Ozouf, Reference Ozouf1982). From the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s to the Vichy Government in the 1940s and beyond, French right-wing movements attributed a specific importance to education, finding the root of all social ills in the overhauling of schools by a leftist, Jewish, and Protestant conspiracy (Shields, Reference Shields2007: 18-20). Since its foundation by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972, the FN continued this tradition by launching systematic attacks on the French education system, although this was not in the form of calling for a return to Catholic education. Instead, the FN critiqued the Republican school on four main accounts: laxity (dissolution of authority), debauchery (absence of morality), barbarism (decadence of order), and illiteracy (low level of education) (Barreau, Reference Barreau2019). The school was characterised as lacking discipline, and propagating anti-national, cosmopolitan, communist, immoral, and individualistic values. The party claimed throughout the 1980s that the education system’s main goal should be ‘national redress’ and ‘improving security’, especially in the face of external dangers such as immigration and European integration (Davies, Reference Davies1999: 26). As the Islamic Veil Affair broke out in 1989, the FN found abundant opportunity to blend its securitised conception of education with a belligerent anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Part I: 1989–2004
The FN’s moment to shine
In the aftermath of the Affair in 1989, ‘no to the chador, no to the invasion!’ became the FN’s immediate rallying call, with Le Pen senior referring to the veil as part of France’s ‘cultural and religious colonisation’ by Islam. With the Affair, the FN found a more tangible enemy, and its strong response to the issue resonated with the French public. A 1991 poll found that 31 per cent of French citizens agreed with the FN’s political stance – a record high for the party. Within a short period, the FN managed to provoke public opinion, and influence mainstream politicians of the right and left, ‘who were now publicly agreeing with the Front on its core issues of immigration and security’ (DeClair, Reference DeClair1999: 93). In this political climate, between the elections of 1986 and 1992, the FN increased its Regional Council seats from 135 to 239 (out of 1880 nationwide), and in the Legislative Elections of 1988 and 1993, its vote-share rose from 9.7 per cent to 12.4 per cent. In the decade that followed the Affair, the FN capitalised on the systematic portrayal of – especially Muslim – immigrants as an issue of economic, cultural, physical, and moral insécurité to the French nation.
From the beginning, the FN’s anti-immigration platform included action items concerning the education system. In a 1991 FN policy paper that laid out fifty anti-immigration measures, some included ‘the expunging of ‘cosmopolitan’ ideas from school textbooks’ and establishing ‘quotas for immigrant children in schools’ (FN, 1991). In the 1995 Presidential Elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen received 15 per cent of the votes, setting another record for his party. In the Municipal Elections of the same year, three FN mayors were elected, which was the first for a far-right party in the Fifth Republic. In one of these three communes, Marignane, kosher and halal alternatives in school cafeterias were discontinued in 1996, which would later become a national policy platform for the party. The same year in Vitrolles, another FN stronghold, the party circulated rumours of a plot to open a Koranic school, and incited mobilisation to stop the ‘Islamization’ of the commune. As part of their ‘France first’ rhetoric, FN mayors propagated the idea that ‘the children of “irregular” immigrants should not have the right to a place in local schools’ due to security concerns (Davies, Reference Davies1999: 194).
The mainstream parties began echoing the FN’s take on the immigration issue in the context of the school system, despite advice to the contrary by legal institutions. On 27 November 1989, the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, advised that religious signs in schools were not in themselves incompatible with laïcité, and recommended school heads to take a case-by-case approach. As the Socialist Minister of Education Lionel Jospin held on to this perspective in his memorandum of 12 December 1989, he was fiercely attacked within and outside of his party. The centre-right Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), the precursor to the UMP, ‘in order to thwart the growing appeal of Le Pen’s National Front’, accused the Socialist government of ‘being ‘too soft’’ on the issue, and of encouraging ‘the pursuit of a Muslim-led ‘insidious jihad’ in the midst of schools’ (Hervieu-Léger, Reference Hervieu-Léger and Berger1998: 68–69). The school-security nexus was constructed as soon as the Affair broke out.
As the RPR came to power in the Legislative Elections of 1993, the new Minister of Education François Bayrou issued two memoranda to schools across the country that discernibly hardened the tone. In the memorandum of 21 September 1994, Bayrou wrote that the Republican ideal ‘excludes the break-up of the nation into separate communities,’ and ‘this ideal is fostered first and foremost in the school’, which is ‘a place of education and integration’. Hence, Bayrou went on, it is not possible to accept the presence of ‘ostentatious signs’ in schools, because they ‘in themselves constitute elements of proselytism or discrimination’, and ‘they put student security at risk’. Such signs, he concluded, should be prohibited ‘in defence of our country’s republican project’ (Bayrou, Reference Bayrou1994: 8-9). The memorandum, which gave school heads the green light to act more sternly on the matter, represents a milestone document in the transformation of laïcité towards an issue of Republican defence and security.
Towards the Law of 2004
Although the controversy briefly peaked and then subsided after Bayrou’s intervention, it was never off the government’s agenda in the second half of the 1990s, ‘in no small part because of insistent pressure from the increasingly visible, far-right populist party, the National Front’ (Scott, Reference Scott2007: 29). At the turn of the century, the centre-right establishment’s answer to the FN’s inflammatory rhetoric came to be embodied in the figure of Nicolas Sarkozy, the Minister of the Interior of the UMP government between 2002 and 2004. Sarkozy’s tough stance on immigration ‘diverged significantly from earlier centre-right handling of these issues, earning him a reputation as a ‘neo-FN’ right-wing politician’ (Laxer, Reference Laxer2019: 62). In the one-year anniversary of the historic Presidential Elections of 21 April 2002, where, to the astonishment of all, Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round, Sarkozy launched what some newspapers called ‘the new headscarf war’. In April 2003, he delivered an incendiary speech insisting that Muslim women pose bareheaded in official identity card photos, because ‘nobody is above the law’ and ‘there cannot be in France an Islam contrary to the Republican values’. Sarkozy’s remarks, which he later referred to as ‘my reply to April 21st’ – that is, the abrupt rise of the FN a year earlier –, clearly alluded to the unresolved headscarf issue in schools (Le Parisien, 2003).
Following Sarkozy’s rekindling of the debate, President Jacques Chirac appointed Bernard Stasi, a French ombudsman, to lead an independent investigation on the question of laïcité in schools. The Commission heard from some 140 politicians, educators, and intellectuals to deliver its final report in December 2003, which, among other suggestions, recommended that ostentatious religious signs be prohibited in public schools. The report justified the ban in the context of the need to ‘promote integration and combat extremist politico-religious tendencies’, especially ‘in the face of the risk of a drift towards communitarianism’ (Stasi, Reference Stasi2003: 2, 35). Yet despite the relatively liberal stance of the report, the parliamentary debates that followed in February 2004 to legislate the ban revealed a discourse of scaremongering, particularly among MPs from the right. This is partly because there were many ‘within the UMP … who saw the law as a way to neutralize Le Pen’ (Bowen, Reference Bowen2007: 106).
One such figure was François Baroin, the UMP’s Vice President of the National Assembly, who argued in his 2003 report to the Prime Minister that ‘a revival of laïcité’ by the centre-right was needed as ‘part of the response to the shock of April 21, 2002’. Baroin wrote that the headscarf represented the ‘destabilisation of the school’, and recommended that the parliament should exercise ‘national sovereignty … to define the meaning of secularism … in the face of the development of Islamism and communitarianism’ (Baroin, Reference Baroin2003). Baubérot (Reference Baubérot2015: 103-18) writes that the Baroin report signifies a larger evolution in the secularism discourses towards laïcité identitaire (identity-based secularism), where the French right began to claim ownership of the concept in an exclusionary fashion, thus reinventing a notion that historically belonged to the left. The word laïcité had not even appeared in a centre-right political campaign document until 1991 (Almeida, Reference Almeida2017: 256).
Parliamentary debates during the making of the Law of 2004 confirm this shift. UMP’s Alain Madelin, for instance, uttered that the veil is a ‘political banner for those who seek to create a space where the laws of Islam would replace those of the Republic’ (Assemblée Nationale, 2004b). His colleague Jacques Barrot likewise said that the veil can be ‘the banner of a refusal of integration into French society’, and ‘the school can become the place of crystallisation of such claims’ (Assemblée Nationale, 2004a). Chantal Brunel of the same party underlined that ‘our school is under threat’, and ‘the Veil Affair is really just the tip of an iceberg’. She added: ‘Front National is already taking advantage of the uncertainties that have been expressed lately … It positions itself as the only effective bulwark against religious extremism. Let us block it by voting a text which will respect the values of our Republic’ (Assemblée Nationale, 2004c). The law was promulgated on 15 March 2004 and came into effect in September 2004 as the new school year began. Throughout the 1989-2004 interval, addressing the ‘Muslim question’ in schools was at least partially a strategy to contain the growing popularity of the FN, where ‘the fear of Le Pen’s party pushed more moderate parties farther to the right’ (Scott, Reference Scott2007: 38).
Part II: 2005–19
Marine Le Pen discovers laïcité
A notable absence in the FN’s anti-immigrant/Islam rhetoric in the 1990s and early 2000s was laïcité. Although the concept was occasionally touched upon by Le Pen the father and some party members at the turn of the century, one had to wait for 2007 for laïcité to become an FN presidential campaign item, and a central mobilisation tool after Marine Le Pen’s assuming of leadership in 2011. The transition was rather swift: even in the presidential election of 2002, the FN campaign documents made reference to restoring the Christian and monarchist roots of France (FN, 2001). Yet by 2012, the FN’s ownership of laïcité was so vigorous that on the eve of the presidential election of that year, French feminist Philosopher Élisabeth Badinter declared, ‘apart from Marine Le Pen, there is no one left to defend laïcité’ (Le Monde des Religions, 2011). It is in this period that the party also dropped its explicitly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric for the purpose of mainstreaming, a process that would reach its zenith with Marine Le Pen’s expulsion of her father from the party in 2015.
Sarkozy’s open courting of the FN electorate in the 2007 presidential elections led to a landslide victory for the UMP, which, according to Marine Le Pen, did not signal the end of the FN, but on the contrary, demonstrated ‘the victory of its ideas’ (Mondon, Reference Mondon2015: 393). In this period too, ‘the Front National put pressure on its competitors to take more explicit – and indeed more restrictive – positions on issues, like veiling, that have not traditionally been bases of contention’ (Laxer, Reference Laxer2019: 46). In 2010, when the UMP passed a bill to ban the wearing full veil in public spaces, the primary justification put forward was security. In the parliamentary report and the related hearings on the full veil produced by the Gerin Commission, led by the Communist MP André Gerin, the word sécurité appears 143 times (Assemblée Nationale, 2010b). The emphasis on security echoed an earlier High Council of Integration report on laïcité in public services, which recommended ‘favouring the constraint imposed by the general interest - security - over individual clothing choices’ (HIC, 2007: 31).
Once such security concern was for the schools and students. In the parliamentary debate, UMP’s Éric Diard underlined that the full veil ‘can be dangerous for the security of others, especially when leaving school’, because ‘teachers cannot identify a woman wearing the full veil’, given the social ‘context where there are many kidnappings’ (Assemblée Nationale, 2010a). Gerin himself characterised the full veil as ‘the tip of the iceberg’, because ‘behind the full veil … the real danger is indoctrination from childhood by a fascinating barbaric ideology’. If no action was taken, he added, ‘we would then be accepting the unacceptable, the triumph of barbarism over civilisation, and profiting the far right’ (Assemblée Nationale, 2010a). Marine Le Pen, unsurprisingly, commented that the law did not go far enough, because the burqa is ‘just the tip of the iceberg’ – using the exact same expression as Gerin. A few months later, she provocatively declared that the sight of Muslim prayers in the street was similar to the Nazi occupation in World War Two, to which Sarkozy’s Minister of the Interior Claude Gueant responded by banning public prayers in Paris the next year. In this interval, the FN built on and contributed to a new understanding of laïcité ‘aimed directly at the singling out and stigmatising of Islam’ (Mondon, Reference Mondon2015: 407). Claiming ownership of laïcité in novel ways, the FN ‘mimicked the French right’s turn to secularism and republicanism during the 1990s’ (Nilsson, Reference Nilsson2019: 15). The FN, in other words, joined the laïcité game to remain relevant.
Placing herself as the defender of laïcité against Islam – or ‘green fascism’, ‘Islamo-fascism’, or simply ‘the invasion’ –, Marine Le Pen promised in her 2012 presidential election document that she would ‘impose republican laïcité against politico-religious contentions’ by adding the phrase ‘the Republic does not recognize any community’ in the constitution, restricting funding for ‘communitarian’ organisations, and ending ‘positive discrimination in schools and educational institutions’ (Rassemblement National, 2012: 7, 16). The FN cited ‘proof’ of Islamisation in sensationalised narratives concerning gender-based divisions in public swimming pools, polygamy, the alleged banning of pork in school cafeterias, and the proliferation of halal food. The scaremongering worked: Marine Le Pen attracted 17.9 per cent of the votes in her 2012 bid for presidency, a figure that her father had never seen. According to one observer, Le Pen’s success was part of a ‘conservative revolution’ that effectuated a transition towards a ‘securitarian’ conception of laïcité (cited in Nilsson, Reference Nilsson2019: 16), where the school, as always, continued to be the primary battleground.
The PS and the school after Charlie
While in opposition, the left was dealing with internal divisions regarding laïcité, as the PS felt under pressure from the right to vocalise concerns about the ‘Muslim question’. Manuel Valls, the Socialist Minister of the Interior (2012–14) and Prime Minister (2014–16), led the hardliner contingent of the party in favour of restricting religious symbols, while figures like Jean-Marc Ayrault (Prime Minister, 2012–14) and François Hollande boycotted the parliamentary vote for the ban on the full veil in 2010. As soon as coming to power in 2012, the Socialist President Hollande kicked off a series of initiatives on laïcité as a way to reclaim, in more inclusive ways, the ownership of the concept for the left. In 2013, Hollande founded the Observatoire de la laïcité (Observatory of Secularism), a consultative body of twenty-three members (recruited mainly from elected officials, scholars, and bureaucrats) to advise the government and the citizens on laïcité and promote its values. The same year, the Observatoire suggested declaring December 9th an official ‘Laïcité Day’ to commemorate the Law of 1905, which was adopted by the Socialist government and has been celebrated in schools since 2014.
The PS also published in 2013 a ‘Charter of Laïcité in Schools’, prepared in the form of a large poster composed of fifteen principles. Displayed in schools ‘in a manner visible to all’, the Charter asserted that ‘the Nation entrusts the School with the mission of sharing with students the values of the Republic’. It included statements on ‘protecting students from proselytism and all kinds of pressures’, creating a ‘common culture’, ‘rejection of all violence’, and that students cannot ‘invoke a religious or political conviction’ to challenge the curriculum (Éducation Nationale, 2013). The educational initiative partially took its inspiration from a 2012 HIC report titled ‘For a Pedagogy of Laïcité in the School’, which argued that laïcité was a must for the prevention of ‘physical or moral violence’ in schools, because it would protect ‘the security of all and order’ in the face of ‘communitarian influences’ (HIC, 2012: 34). The laïcité initiatives of the PS did not impress Marine Le Pen. She suggested that the Charter was meaningless without further restrictions on Islam such as banning the veil in universities and private day-care centres (Rassemblement National, 2013). The latter was a reference to the Baby-Loup Affair earlier in the year, where a French court decided that a private day-care centre discriminated against a Muslim employee by firing her for not removing her headscarf on the job.
Other pressure items were school cafeterias and trips. In 2014, Le Pen declared that ‘to save laïcité’, she would ‘reinstate’ the serving of pork and ban halal meat in school cafeterias, because ‘we will not accept any religious requirements in school menus’ (Le Monde, 2014). Similarly, when the Council of State ruled in 2013 that women accompanying students in school outings could not be asked to remove their headscarves, Marine Le Pen made a call for ‘a laïque offensive’, arguing that against ‘the disturbing progression of communitarianism and politico-religious claims … the school environment is a framework that must be particularly protected’ (Le Parisien, 2013). In all these instances, laïcité was constructed as the saviour of the school from religious violations.
The year 2015 was a turning point in the securitisation of laïcité narratives in education. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks on January 7th, ‘the secular school’ was immediately reconfigured ‘as a bulwark against terrorism’, as ‘laïcité and sécurité seemed to be the hallmarks of the French government’s response to the attacks on France’ (Rioux, Reference Rioux2015). Two weeks after the attacks, the Minister of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem announced the ‘Great Mobilisation of the School for the Values of the Republic’, which vowed ‘to put laïcité … at the heart of the mobilisation of the school’. The measures included making the comprehension of laïcité an employment criterion for teachers, formation of 1,000 new specialists to train teachers on laïcité, requiring parents to sign the Charter of Laïcité, active celebration of ‘laïcité day’ and other ‘Republican rites and symbols’ in schools, and the reintroduction of moral and civic education courses ‘from elementary school to the end of high school’, with a total of 300 hours for each student. The report also declared that ‘particular attention will be paid to the risks of … radicalisation of young people’, and encouraged ‘systematic reporting’ of ‘behaviours questioning the values of the Republic’ (MEN, 2015a).
The same year, the Ministry of Education issued a booklet on ‘Preventing the Radicalisation of the Youth’, which, although meant to be for any kind of radicalisation, did not hide that the main concern was the Islamic kind. The document provided educators a list of ‘warning signs’ to identify students who may pose a security threat, including changes in ‘dietary and clothing’ choices, ‘rejection and speech of condemnation from Western society’, or ‘sudden interest in a given religion or ideology’. To make things even clearer, the document advised educators to contact authorities immediately if they suspected certain students, by calling a hotline or submitting a form on the government website stop-djihadisme.gouv.fr (MEN, 2015b). ‘The school After Charlie’, in short, ‘led to an escalation’ in the display of laïcité ‘as a defensive response conveying identity repositories’ (Mabilon-Bonfils, Reference Mabilon-Bonfils2015: 37), this time led by the Socialist government. Around the same time, the regional elections of 2015 resulted in an all-time-high for the FN, which received 27.7 per cent of the votes.
The tendency of securitisation only intensified after the coordinated Islamist terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris, which killed 130 people. In May 2016, the Ministry of Education established ‘radicalisation leads’ (référents radicalisation) in its territorial units, which, working directly with the Ministry of the Interior, serve as a ‘point of contact between schools and the security services’ (James and Janmaat, Reference James and Janmaat2019: 79). In the 110th anniversary of the Law of 1905, Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared his government as ‘the defender of laïcité against the FN and radical Islamism’ (Le Point, 2015). In an interview a few months later, the president of the pro-secularism association Comité Laïcité République Patrick Cassell similarly characterised laïcité as ‘a bulwark against the FN’, uttering that ‘we defend laïcité … to avoid its absence paving the way for the National Front’ (CLR, 2016). The FN and Marine Le Pen never ceased to be a point of reference for developing laïcité discourses and policy visions in the post-2004 period.
Conclusion
Since the beginning of the Macron presidency in 2017, ‘there seems to be a good deal of consistency’ between his République en marche and the previous PS government in the framing of the school as the abode of ‘laïcité, Republican values, and preventing radicalisation’ (James and Janmaat, Reference James and Janmaat2019: 80). In February 2018, for instance, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe unveiled a nationwide radicalisation prevention strategy that included a section on ‘defending the values of the Republican school’ and ‘developing support systems for laïcité’ to ‘shield minds against radicalisation’ (CIPDR, 2018: 9). The same year, the Ministry of Education founded the ‘Council of Laïcité Sages’ (Le conseil des sages de la laïcité) to advise the government on the application of secularism in the education system. In 2019, the Ministry published its ‘Policy for the Prevention of Violent Radicalisation in Schools’, which referred to education as the point of ‘primary prevention’ against extremist behaviours (MEN, 2019). These examples confirm that, especially in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo, the Republican school has been ‘consistently figured as the front lines of a battleground, in which teachers, students, and parents are all combatants’ (Wesselhoeft, Reference Wesselhoeft2017: 626). The change of government in 2017 did not make a significant difference in this regard.
Based on a sequential analysis of the period since the Islamic Veil Affair of 1989, this article demonstrated that the post-Charlie Hebdo characterisation of the school as a place of Republican defence represents merely the latest episode of a longer-term securitisation of secular educational narratives in France during the past three decades. In the analysed periods of 1989–2004 and 2005–19, the article provided evidence to underpin the argument that the FN, although it never held national power, has been a key player in this transformation due to its influence on the mainstream parties. This relationship, however, was a symbiotic one: while the competition with the FN pushed the political establishment towards tougher positions on the ‘Muslim Question’ in schools, the FN ended up mainstreaming through the reclaiming and reshaping of laïcité in an identity-based fashion. In the process, the rise of the party continued: in the presidential elections of 2017, Le Pen made it to the second round by collecting 21.3 per cent of the votes. And in the European Parliament elections of 2014 and 2019, the FN (and the RN) became the first party in France, collecting roughly one in four votes across the country.
The case of the FN confirms the characterisation of populism as a securitising act that rests on a constant incitement of fear (Norris and Inglehart, Reference Norris and Inglehart2019). Populists insist that only they can protect the ‘people’ against that threat, because the ‘elite’ are supposedly collaborating with the enemy, the ‘others’. In France, the FN’s securitisation of the Muslim minority as a ‘communitarian’ threat translated into mainstream discourses and policies via the consistent framing of laïcité in education in two interrelated ways: as the protector of the particular safety of the school, and the general safety of the Republic. From the Bayrou memorandum of 1994 to the Law of 2004, and from the 2013 ‘Charter of Laïcité in Schools’ to the 2019 ‘Prevention of Violent Radicalisation in Schools’, these two roles ascribed to laïcité as a defence mechanism have been articulated in various permutations. Ironically, in each episode, as the mainstream parties openly justified their policies as a way to hinder the rise of the FN, their narratives responded to, and at times directly incorporated, those of the FN. The end of this tendency does not seem to be in sight. In September 2019, for instance, as the President hardened the tone on immigration to appease what he termed the ‘insécurité culturelle’ experienced by the French people, the coverage of the story by the leftist newspaper l’Humanité (2019) was not completely off the mark: ‘Emmanuel Macron takes over from Marine Le Pen’.
For the scholarly literature that studies the relationship between populism, religion/secularity, and policymaking in the twenty–first century, three conclusions follow from France’s recent history. First, the study of right–wing populism should not limit itself to populist movements in power. The FN is indicative of a larger Western trend whereby far-right parties can have an indirect yet powerful effect on mainstream policymaking, and in turn go through partial mainstreaming themselves (Mondon, Reference Mondon2013; Carvalho, Reference Carvalho2014). The French example shows that the ‘contagion’ of populist policy paradigms is not limited to the widely studied domains of immigration and welfare, but can also impact public education. Second, while there is an abundant literature on right-wing populism as ideology, style, strategy, or economic policy, research on the dynamic ways in which populists articulate religion and secularity as part of their identity-based policy frameworks is still in its early stages (Brubaker, Reference Brubaker2017; Nilsson, Reference Nilsson2019). The evolution of the FN from Le Pen the father to Le Pen the daughter attests that populists are far from being static on the matter. Marine Le Pen not only abandoned the overtly Catholic rhetoric of her father, but also followed the lead of the centre-right in claiming ownership of laïcité – a policy agenda that historically belonged to the left. Third, and finally, the concept of securitisation, especially as a way to inform policies towards religious minorities, deserves more attention than it has so far received in the populism literature (Cesari, Reference Cesari2012). The discourse of securitisation, as the FN example demonstrates, serves as a powerful tool to obscure rational and evidence-based policymaking debates, spreads sensationalised and fear-inducing accounts targeting immigrants and religious minorities, and creates a sense of urgency to push mainstream governments into hasty action. Should the cultural backlash provoked by right-wing populism continue to gain ground in the twenty-first century, alarmist social policy narratives concerning religion, secularity, and identity can be expected to surge in novel and more aggressive combinations.
