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I Introduction
La République se vit à visage découvert
French government poster, 2011Footnote 1In 2010, the French parliament enacted a law prohibiting the practice of face-covering in public spaces.Footnote 2 Despite earlier misgivings on the part of the Conseil d'Etat (Conseil d'Etat, 2010), the Conseil Constitutionnel held the law constitutionally valid. While framing the law as a legitimate and proportionate response to public order concerns, the Conseil also invoked the constitutional principle of gender equality.Footnote 3 While the parliamentary commission on veiling practices had recommended only a partial prohibition in certain public spaces – and while the Conseil d'Etat had warned that a broader prohibition would enjoy ‘no sound juridical basis’ – the legislation gave effect to the government's steadfast ambition to expel the so-called voile intégrale (literally, the ‘full’ veil, meaning burqa and niqab) from all public spaces. The measure did not prohibit the burqa or niqab, or even specifically religious garb as such: it defined the offence in the ostensibly neutral terms of public face-covering, while exempting various non-religious face-covering practices.Footnote 4 However, it was widely understood as a reaction to the specific phenomenon of religious face-covering by Muslim women.
The legislation coincided with the onset of economic crisis as well as a renewed interest in French national identity, with the UMPFootnote 5-led government organising a series of town hall style debates on this theme. In practice, the debate was closely bound up with questions related to immigration. In particular, it centred on the question of what cultural and religious practices could be tolerated in a republican polity. Gender equality, specifically, was portrayed as a tenet of republicanism as a public philosophy. Moreover, the national identity debate was bound up with the anxious defence of France's distinct tradition of laïcité, or constitutional secularism, and specifically the question of what ‘ostentatious’ religious practices it could accommodate. Thus it overlapped with a broader question as to how the religious ‘private’ was to be delineated from the secular ‘public’. The Left overwhelmingly rejected the national identity exercise as an exercise in the ‘stigmatisation’ of minorities, whereas sections of the republican and Gaullist Right also expressed misgivings (Landrin and Van Eeckhout, Reference Landrin and Van Eeckhout2010).
Correspondingly, the philosophical foundations of French national identity were revisited. In the historical republican conception, national identity was to be defined solely with reference to the commonly held political ideas of the social contract – the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity, and so forth – which could be endorsed by citizens independently of their non-political or private identities (Bui-Xuan, Reference Bui-xuan2004; Nicolet, Reference Nicolet2000; Baubérot, Reference Baubérot2006). ‘Pre-political’ commonalities based on common ethnic or religious origins were to be excluded from the terms of national belonging; a republican sense of people-hood or common identity was distinguished from any ethnos. This abstract definition of citizenship rendered it ‘universalist’. Moreover, the republican tradition posited a delineation and separation of public and private identities. Religious, ethnic and other non-political identities were to remain private and could not give rise to ‘particularist’ rights. Conversely, however, citizens were to remain free to exercise such identities in the ‘private’ sphere, within the limits of public order. Thus it was optimistically assumed that an abstract or universalist citizenship could be reconciled with individuals' right to exercise their private, particularist identities.
This has clear resonances with Anglo-American political liberalism. To borrow Rawlsian terms, the republican conception of justice applies solely to the institutional ‘basic structure’ and has no ‘regulatory role for all of life’ (Rawls, Reference Rawls2001, p. 144). Yet, problematically, recent ‘republican’ discourses in France have assumed that national identity prescribes lived values which require obeisance (including symbolic obeisance) by citizens across various non-political domains. As Mullally (this issue) similarly notes, public philosophy is thus deployed as a disciplinary instrument for identitarian affirmations seen as destabilising to a liberal (or ‘republican’) social order.
Thus, in France's recent debate, national identity was increasingly used to problematise and invigilate religious and cultural practices traditionally thought to belong to the ‘private’ sphere. Gender equality, construed as a ‘national value’ to be affirmed in the face of ‘communitarian’ fragmentation, was invoked against cultural and religious practices thought symbolically offensive to this principle. Thus national identity was increasingly linked to the affirmation of a dominant non-political way of life. Indeed, as both Mullally (this issue) and Enright (this issue) note, minority practices specifically tend to be unevenly vested with this incongruous political significance within ‘universalist’ liberal and republican discourses.
For example, in 2010, the Conseil d'Etat upheld the denial of nationality to a niqab-wearing woman of Moroccan origin on the grounds of ‘failure to assimilate’ within the terms of Article 21-4 of the Civil Code.Footnote 6Mme M.'s garb was held to be indicative of ‘a radical religious practice incompatible with the essential values of French society’Footnote 7 – in particular, the value of gender equality. Thus, ‘national identity’ became bound up with a politics of lifestyle, and connected to a sort of majority communitarianism: as Vakulenko notes, Mme M ‘purports to inculcate the values of laïcité and sex equality well beyond the public sphere’ (2009, p. 144). Mullally (Reference Mullally2011) suggests this is set within a broader trend, in the immigration context, towards a concept of ‘earned citizenship’, requiring acceptance and internalisation of ‘non-negotiable’ dominant cultural norms.
Yet simultaneously there is deep confusion as to the reach and object of ‘national values’, as to the extent they must pervade and regulate the intimate and ‘private’. This tension was evident in the Conseil d'Etat's aforementioned advisory report on the then-putative veiling ban, in its affirmation, specifically, that laïcité and gender equality – both ‘national values’ given legal and constitutional force – could not themselves offer a legal basis for prohibiting essentially private religious garb. It affirmed: ‘the principle of laïcité applies directly to public bodies, which justifies an obligation of neutrality for public agents in the exercise of their functions. However, it cannot be applied directly to society or to individuals’ (Conseil d'Etat, 2010, p. 18, emphasis added). On this account, ‘secularism’ – as a ‘national value’ – did not apply to private conduct as such; it imposed religious ‘neutrality’ on the state and its agents, but not any duty of religious ‘discretion’ for private citizens in the manifestation and exercise of their faith, even in the ‘public’ square. This contradicted a widespread public consensus – crystallised in the era of veiling bans – that visible markers of religious difference in the public square contravene laïcité.
In this article, I consider this intellectual confusion as to the object and reach of national identity in the light of the ‘universalist’ conception of citizenship in French republican thought. I aim to set these themes – approached from different angles in this issue by Enright, Mullally and Macklin – within the normative landscape of political liberalism. On one account, the French republican tradition privatises religious, ethnic and other infra-national or non-political identities but allows for the free exercise of non-liberal identities and conceptions of the good within the limits of public order. In this interpretation, it shares political liberalism's eschewal of ‘comprehensive’ or perfectionist liberalisms as grounds for public justification and thus reconciles republican politics to a ‘reasonable pluralism’. On a thicker account, however, the republican social order requires a deeper projection of republican values within citizens' lifestyles, social practices and conceptions of the good – and so a tighter circumscription on rival sources of attachment. On this view, the stability of the republican order depends on social cohesion, and thus the attenuation of strong markers of religious and cultural difference. In practice, then, national identity becomes more closely associated with a dominant non-political way of life, the distinction between civic republicanism and ethno-nationalism is blurred, and the ‘universalism’ of the prevailing republican thought seems unsustainable. National identity then also acquires a thicker, and more exclusionary scope. This recent orientation of French republican discourse can be located within a broader European pattern addressed by Mullally (this issue) and Jivraj (this issue). Whereas ‘national values’ generally are used to problematise minority cultural and religious identities, gender equality and secularism in particular have, in the French context, assumed an incongruous disciplinary role for certain practices deemed threatening to republican social cohesion.
II National identity in the French republican tradition
Standard assessments of the French republican history of thought assume a certain specificity in its conception of national identity. It is routinely cast as inclusive and egalitarian by virtue of being defined in purely political and civic rather than ethno-religious terms, dissociated from any non-political identities which might otherwise be thought to bind its members (Nicolet, Reference Nicolet2000). Along with the prevailing understanding of citizenship itself, it is thus an abstracted and universalist conception. National identity is said to be abstracted both from any ‘pre-political’ commonalities – the ‘blood and soil’ criteria of pedigree and origin – as well any supra-political commonalities based on ‘comprehensive’ doctrines or worldviews. Citizenship must then be understood in abstract and ‘political’ terms and non-political identities excluded from the political domain. This conception of national identity is not unique to republicanism or France; J. S. Mill wrote that the strongest ‘causes’ of national feeling were not race, religion and language, but ‘identity of political antecedents [and] the possession of a national history’ (Reference Mill1861/2008, p. 189). It is echoed in Habermas's argument that the republican conception of government by consent is undermined where ‘the integrative force of the nation of citizens is to something independent of and prior to the political opinion and will-formation of the citizens themselves’ (Reference Habermas, Habermas, Cronin and de Greiff1999, p. 111).
This delineation of the private and public self contains echoes in Anglo-American political liberalism. French republicanism's self-understanding centres on its claim to ‘universalism’ – the idea that it somehow transcends citizens' ‘particularist’ worldviews, identities and origins. Laborde attributes this tradition partly to ‘the Rousseau-influenced revolutionary hostility to intermediary groups and “factions” — associated with privileges, divisiveness and corruption’ (Reference Laborde2005, p. 316). Indeed, while Rousseau's thought wielded considerable influence on French political and constitutional doctrine, he is generally accredited as ‘the doctrinal founder of political nationalism and is said to have equated nationhood entirely with the expression of a people's collective will’ (Barnard, Reference Barnard1983, p. 231). One public intellectual articulated and distilled an impressively broad intellectual consensus on national identity in republican France in saying: ‘Grosso modo, there are two types of nationalism: the French, based on the social contract, and the Germanic, based on blood, soil and tongue …’ (Lebourg, Reference Lebourg2010).
Thus, it is assumed the solidarity and fraternity needed for participative self-government can be sustained without reliance on any commonality external or prior to the political, and located within the political alone. National identity is constructed through citizens' shared commitment to institutions and political values, to the values of liberté, égalité and fraternité, as well as a shared set of memories and political traditions – what Mill termed the ‘community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation’ (Reference Mill1861/2008, p. 189). Again this echoes Rawlsian political liberalism in claiming to predicate the political bond solely on a ‘common human reason’ which transcends differences of background and origin (Durand, Reference Durand2010, p. 17). The common phrase ‘vouloir vivre ensemble’ – literally, ‘the desire to live together’ – reflects this idea of the republic as a scheme for social co-operation based on a thin, abstract conception of citizens as free and equal agents, and as having a moral personality independent of their various non-political identities. It captures the idea, familiar to political liberalism, of a voluntarist social contract formulated from an abstract standpoint of deliberative equality, in which reasons of identity, as well as reasons based on morally arbitrary and natural contingencies, are set aside as the basis of valid claims. It assumes similarly that private autonomy in respect of comprehensive doctrines and conceptions of the good is attained only where the public conception of justice is defined independently of any such conception or identity. In Anglo-American theory the best-known formulation of this idea is Rawls's ‘liberal principle of legitimacy’ – the idea that democratic state power must be exercised on terms that all persons can ‘reasonably be expected to endorse’, independently of their own comprehensive doctrines and based on a shared ‘political’ conception of the person as ‘free and equal’ (Rawls, Reference Rawls1996; Reference Rawls2001).
Thus, in the French context, nationalism could be rendered inclusive by abstracting it to the ‘political’. A robust civic nationalism might also offer a necessary source of stability and social cohesion for republican politics without creating hierarchies based on origin or belief (Nicolet, Reference Nicolet2000, Bui-Xuan, Reference Bui-xuan2004).
Rawls described the ‘problem of political liberalism’ as being the question of ‘how it is possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical and moral doctrines’ (Reference Rawls1996, p. xxv). To secure legitimacy in a context of ‘reasonable pluralism’ – the ‘plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines’ – the public conception of justice had to remain ‘political not metaphysical’, addressing itself to the narrow question of social co-operation and eschewing philosophical concerns of ultimate truth (p. xxv). However, in the European context especially, the problem of legitimacy must be equally addressed to the question of ‘origins’ – our pre-political identities – as much as our beliefs and comprehensive doctrines. As Habermas (Reference Habermas, Habermas, Cronin and de Greiff1999) acknowledges, ‘origins’ are as problematic to the notion of citizenship as are what Rawls (Reference Rawls2001) termed our ‘final ends’. Whether public philosophy and civic identity can ever be truly ‘freestanding’ from the ‘pre-political’ origins of the citizens is as salient as the question of whether, in the Rawlsian lens, it may transcend ‘comprehensive doctrines’. In the French context, especially, the question of whether civic nationalism can transcend pre-political commonalities is perhaps more salient than the religious and philosophical diversity which Rawls – perhaps influenced by the American context – identified as the central challenge of liberal legitimation.
The republican-universalist conception is usually traced to the French Revolution, which saw the abolition of legal classifications based on social rank, religion and other non-public identities. The ‘universalist’ understanding of Jewish emancipation was evident in Tonnerre's famous insistence to the National Assembly that ‘we must accord the Jews nothing as a nation, but everything as individuals: they must neither become a state nor a separate order, but become individual citizens’. The revolutionaries were influenced by Rousseau's highly abstracted idea of equality under the impersonal rule of the general will. Insisting on the universal and uniform applicability of legislation irrespective of infra-state identities, Rousseau said:
‘The social pact establishes equality among the citizens in that they all pledge themselves under the same conditions and must all enjoy the same rights. Hence … the sovereign recognises only the whole body of the nation and makes no distinction between any of the members who compose it.’ (Reference Rousseau1762/1988, p. 76)
In the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan's influential voluntarist conception of the nation sustained this tradition in the face of romantic nationalism. Whereas the prevailing Germanic conception, influenced by romantics such as Herder, based nationality on non-political, ethno-cultural commonalities, Renan defined it with reference to the subjective desire of its members to live together in a political union, irrespective of non-political identities (Renan, Reference Renan1882; Tawil, Reference Tawil2010). This is echoed in ongoing contemporary efforts to formulate a constitutional patriotism based solely on a shared political culture (Habermas, Reference Habermas, Habermas, Cronin and de Greiff1999). Indeed, as Bell and Baggio note, in official terms the nation is, normally, resolutely political; nations are not cast as ‘facts of nature’, but rather as being ‘consciously constituted through political action’ (Reference Bell and Baggio2002, p. 867). Thus, just as republicanism (arguably) presupposes a national community which can undergird the necessary solidarities that participative self-government requires, the content of this national identity is in turn itself shaped by a shared institutional and political life. Others argue that the attempt to define nationality in purely civic or political terms is doomed to incoherence, as the very point of national identity is to provide a prior legitimation for the political (Barnard, Reference Barnard1983, p. 231).
In any event, this universalist and abstracted conception of national identity has retained an extraordinary hold in contemporary French republican thought. Kritzman terms this a ‘useful distinction between the national community as the product of a social contract, versus one that functions as the sociological expression of a pre-existing volkgeist’ (Reference Kritzman1995, p. 6). Yet while this republicanism rejects any exclusivist ethno-nationalist conception, it nonetheless requires an affective or fraternal bond, albeit one oriented solely towards the public and institutional domain. However, the thinness of this conception of common identity raises the question of its sufficiency and stability in real-world politics.
2.1 Civic nationalism and formal equality in the French constitutional tradition
To some degree, at least, the conception of national identity as abstract, political and resolutely civic was historically reflected in the institutional life and positive laws of the French republics. French law – the Vichy interlude aside – has long eschewed any legal classifications based on differences of origin or identity as such, and in particular rejects racial or religious classifications whether benign or otherwise. The ‘indivisibility’ of the Republic proclaimed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and in Article 2 of the 1958 Constitution, coupled with the prohibition of any legal distinctions unrelated to ‘common utility’,Footnote 8 underlies a strongly formalistic conception of equality before the law. This has precluded any positive action quotas based on race or religion, although socio-economic criteria for ‘positive discrimination’ have been used (Baubérot, Reference Baubérot2006, p. 117). Thus, Bui-Xuan notes:
‘Universalism has been intimately linked to liberal individualism … in French public law, it is individuals that possess rights and duties, not groups … its universalist foundation suggest that individuals enjoy the same rights and duties; they have a veritable “right to indifference” with regard to their origins … this universalism is typically described as “republican” … the use of this term allows both to convey the rupture with the Ancien Régime and to distinguish it from foreign legal systems, notably Anglo-Saxon law which, whether implicitly or explicitly, recognizes the rights of infra-state communities.’ (Bui-Xuan, Reference Bui-xuan2004, p. 5)
Recently, however, this tradition has become somewhat incongruous, given the introduction, inter alia, of a gender parity law for political parties (Benhabib, Reference Benhabib and Scott2008; Calvès, Reference Calvès2002; Reference Calvès2008).
The republican-universalist tradition receives a distinctive translation in the context of religion. The principle of laïcité has been interpreted as prescribing a strict, formalist conception of legislative neutrality towards religion. In law, republican universalism was evident, for example, in the interpretation of laïcité by the Conseil Constitutionnel as precluding ‘the use of religious beliefs as a criterion with which to gain exemption from the rules governing the relationship between private individuals and public entities’.Footnote 9 In this lens, religious freedom and equality are thought reducible to the requirements of state neutrality, embodied in the 1905 law of separation of churches and state, which protects freedom of conscience and prevents the state from ‘recognising’, ‘endowing’ or ‘subsidising’ religions.Footnote 10 Specific forms of religious accommodation, however, are assumed to contravene republican ‘universalism’. In this light, Laborde (Reference Laborde2005) argues that laïcité is redolent of Brian Barry's egalitarian critique of multiculturalism (Reference Barry2001), rejecting any use of religious or cultural criteria as a basis for defining individual rights. Thus, laïcité and republican universalism are posited as alternatives to ‘communitarian’ or normative–multicultural models. The rights guaranteed by citizenship can never be defined or differentiated on the basis of religious identity as such; instead, republican citizenship entitles citizens to a political and legal status abstracted from non-institutional differences; indeed, this is thought to undergird private autonomy. Thus, citizenship is radically deracinated and disembodied. Scott quotes Abbé Sieyes's claim that democracy requires ‘the complete sacrifice of … the concrete being to the abstract being’ (Reference Scott2007, p. 13). Similarly, Laborde argues: ‘republican laïcité endorses a more expansive conception of the public sphere than political liberalism, as well as a thicker construal of the “public selves” which make up the citizens of the republic’ (Reference Laborde2005, p. 307).
Accordingly, universalist republicanism is commonly invoked against a much derided communautarisme,Footnote 11 ‘differentialist’ and deterministic. Correspondingly, infra-national communities are denied legal and political recognition (Nicolet, Reference Nicolet2000, p. 30). This republican universalism yields two distinctive legal principles; first, a strict formal equality, blind to ‘origins’; second, the principle of ‘indivisibility’ that precludes recognition of intra-state groups. The second element was reflected, for example, in the invalidation by the Conseil Constitutionnel of a legislative accord with Corsican nationalists allowing for recognition of a Corsican ‘people’ and its cultural distinctiveness.Footnote 12 ‘Minorities’, it is asserted, whether territorial, ethnic or religious, can never enjoy rights as such, on the basis of any assumed commonality or shared origin of their members; rather, their right is that to a civic status defined independently of any such assumed commonality (Bui-Xuan, Reference Bui-xuan2004, p. 23). This cannot be attributed purely to xenophobic reaction: peculiarly, in French politics, resistance to normative multiculturalism is (arguably) as commonplace on the Left as the Right. Incongruously, it was the centre-right Sarkozy who was most receptive to the idea of so-called ‘open secularism’, to the Anglo-American terminologies of ‘diversity’, to the possibility of affirmative action and to the idea of amending the 1905 law of separation in order to allow state funding for ‘moderate’ mosques (Balibar, Reference Balibar1991; Baubérot, Reference Baubérot2006). Indeed, Spektorowski (Reference Spektorowski2000) makes the comparatively radical claim that normative multiculturalism, as a substitute for republican citizenship, has been deployed and instrumentalised by the neoliberal French ‘New Right’. Conversely, it was a communist deputy, André Gerin, who was instrumental in instigating the anti-veiling debate in 2009, and who presided over the parliamentary commission which recommended a partial ban (French National Assembly, 2010) (although the majority of socialist deputies abstained in the parliamentary vote).
Indeed, Baubérot and Durand both note great irony in the fact that while the official republican philosophy is depicted as a singular, distinct, even exclusive French patrimony, it has somehow become sufficiently malleable and indeterminate to gain allegiance across the partisan and ideological spectrum. Thus Durand notes of ‘New Republicans’: ‘today, everybody in France is republican and the French please themselves in the idea that this “republican tradition” is their possession: a heritage of which they have simultaneously both the exclusive ownership and the exclusive legitimate interpretation’ (Reference Durand2010, pp. 10–11). In the nineteenth century, republicanism represented merely a ‘political standpoint amongst others’, before effectively becoming a civil religion that would be endorsed by all shades of the political spectrum, all the while ‘proclaiming its continuity with a mythical past’ (pp. 15, 17).
2.2 Digressions in the republican tradition
On the one hand, it is clear that political liberalism's aim to abstract citizenship from ‘pre-political’ and ‘non-institutional’ identities receives an unusually intense expression in the French history of thought – one, indeed, that may appear eccentric and dogmatic from the viewpoint of Anglo-American political culture. Indeed, as Birnbaum notes, Anglo-American scholars ‘view the French model as an almost totalitarian regime in which identities are repressed’ (Reference Birnbaum2008–2009, p. 2431.) However, the universalism of the republican tradition has not been pursued with much consistency. Indeed, it has recently undergone something of a renewed crisis under the pressures of globalisation and with the resurgence of various forms of ‘identity politics’, including the anti-republican conception of national belonging asserted by far-right nationalism. Viard notes how the Third Republic saw the construction of an introspective national identity, linked to a rugged, rural and nativist vision – a patriotism evoking the ‘sons of peasants … ready to re-take Alsace-Lorraine from the Germans’ (Reference Viard2010, p. 16). The universalism embodied in the 1789 Declaration was juxtaposed, through the Third and Fourth Republics in particular, with the theories of racial and cultural supremacy that sustained the colonial enterprise. Touraine notes how Guy Mollet, an exemplary secularist of the Fourth Republic, defended the Algerian colonisation as a tool for asserting universal republican values in the face of ‘Islamic fanaticism’. Thus, Touraine argues, ‘the French have generally used universalism as an instrument for the rejection and domination of the Other’ (cited in Viard, Reference Viard1996, p. 89). While the ideals of the 1789 Declaration, Bui-Xuan notes, were originally envisaged as applying to ‘all of humanity’ (Reference Bui-xuan2004, p. 3), this was contradicted by the inevitable understanding that it would be exercised and practised within a sovereign polity and thus, necessarily, within a particularist national community, bounded in fact, if not in theory, by various ‘pre-political’, organic solidarities.
As discussed, historically, French republican thought officially eschewed any claim to define citizenship and national identity based on common non-political identities. Thus, in principle, it would seem compatible with an extensive cultural, religious and ethnic diversity. However, historically, extensive diversity was understood as threatening the social cohesion needed to sustain the civic virtues and the national ‘indivisibility’ associated with participative self-government. On this view, a republican politics based on the common good cannot be sustained without the stability provided by a dominant non-political culture. Thus, paradoxically, republican particularism was often invoked to eliminate ‘local particularisms’, for example in the campaign against regional languages in the nineteenth century (Bui-Xuan, Reference Bui-xuan2004, p. 4) Therefore, republican universalism speaks to two contradictory senses of national indivisibility – to a unitary and abstract idea of citizenship as an imperative of republican legitimacy, but also to a community that is reasonably cohesive empirically and socially, as an imperative of republican stability.
Thus, French republican universalism has historically oscillated between an abstracted view of citizenship, familiar to political liberalism and focused on legitimation, and a darker universalist project emphasising assimilation and cohesion, and focused on stability. The latter impulse was evident, for example, in the republican crusade against regional languages (Bui-Xuan Reference Bui-xuan2004, pp. 11–13). This resonates today in an ongoing intellectual confusion as to whether republicanism requires citizens to privatise their religious identities in the relatively limited sense of disavowing any institutional imposition or recognition of such beliefs – or alternatively, to refrain from asserting such identities in the public square and thus diluting the dominant non-political culture. In turn, it is unclear, in the era of veiling prohibitions, whether laïcité requires citizens to privatise their religious beliefs socially and personally, as well as juridically and politically.
2.3 Gender politics and multiculturalism in the face of republican universalism
This relative incoherence of the dominant republican universalism has been strongly reflected in gender politics. Women were never granted voting rights during the Third Republic (1870–1940) partly because it was feared they could not master the rugged virtues of republican contestation, and partly based on fears that they would vote under manipulative clericalist influence (Baubérot, Reference Baubérot2006, p. 42). Thus, Kahn (Reference Kahn2007) notes that the now-commonplace association of laïcité and gender equality is quite a recent phenomenon dating only from the headscarf controversies. In recent years, the recognition of certain legal categories based on gender have further undermined the purist claims of the official, republican-universalist philosophy (Bui-Xuan, Reference Bui-xuan2004). A constitutional amendment was necessary to allow the introduction of a gender-parity law, implemented through the party funding system (Benhabib, Reference Benhabib and Scott2008). Indeed, Calvès notes that the ‘trinity’ of ‘national sovereignty, national indivisibility and equality before the law’ (Reference Calvès2002, p. 174) – which had historically prevented various forms of legal classification – has come under sustained assault by a number of constitutional revisions, and no longer holds the same explanatory force. Yet there remains a broad taboo against any legislative classifications based on ethnicity – or even the use of statistics based on these identities (Möschel, Reference Möschel2009; Calvès, Reference Calvès2008). Historically, as Bui-Xuan notes, the republican-universalist orthodoxy has permitted legislative differentiation based only on transient social and economic circumstances rather than deeper constitutive ‘identities’ (Reference Bui-xuan2004, p. 4). Thus, Benhabib notes:
‘The French parité movement was unique because it faced the crisis of representativity – namely, the absence in the public sphere of a robust representation of differences among the citizens – head on without forfeiting ideals of republican universalism. It attempted to integrate women into public life without advocating either an affirmative action model as in liberal feminism or an essentialized group understanding as advocated by theorists of female difference.’ (Reference Benhabib and Scott2008, p. 222)
Indeed, Bereni (Reference Bereni2007) notes how, through the parity law, French feminists ‘renegotiated republican universalism’ by making a case for the exceptional nature of gender difference in relation to other identities. Yet the prevailing wisdom with regard to ethnicity and religion remains, as Bui-Xuan notes, that ‘any juridical recognition of minorities collides with the universalist logic – to transform a minority as a judicial category would juridically consecrate the segmentation of society as a function of criteria like language, religion or ethnic origin, it would amount to the recognition, within the state, of groups having a common past and future, apart from other citizens not sharing the same “identititarian mark”’ (Reference Bui-xuan2004, p. 11). This recalls Rawls's insistence on citizens' ‘right’ to enjoy a civic status defined independently of their non-institutional identities – ‘to view [themselves] as independent from and not identified with any particular conceptions of the good, or scheme of final ends’ (Reference Rawls2001, p. 21). And today, more pertinently, the deployment of universalist values against minority cultural practices deemed threatening to social cohesion bears out Touraine's argument that ‘the crisis of the “republican” nation-state has produced in France an introspection, an essentialisation of the self, a regressive naturalisation’ (cited in Viard, Reference Viard1996).
Thus, while republican ‘taboos’ focus on ethnicity and religion, they often tolerate other forms of differentiation based on ‘identitarian’ criteria (Durand, Reference Durand2010, p. 14). Whilst exemptions for religious conduct from generally applicable laws are deemed contrary to republican laïcité, local cultural practices, such as bullfighting in the south, are legally accommodated.Footnote 13 Legal rights are not defined, in practice, from the departure point of an abstracted normative conception that transcend origins and identities. Laïcité itself, and the 1905 law, are not universally applied; the separation regime was never applied to Alsace-Moselle, where certain features of the pre-1905 ConcordatFootnote 14 regime remain in place, while religious ‘establishments’ remain in place in certain overseas territories such as French Guyane (Baubérot, Reference Baubérot2006, pp. 64–65).
III National identity between republican passion and liberal abstraction
National identity is problematic for political liberalism. As discussed, Rawls influentially argued that in a democratic society the public conception of justice must be formulated from the abstract standpoint of the ‘original position’, independently of comprehensive doctrines or conceptions of the good – as well as contingent origins and identities, considerations that are ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’ (Rawls, Reference Rawls2001, p. 144). Thus, public justification must exclude reliance on non-public identities – including any conception of national identity that embraces non-political criteria. While some scholars argue that Rawls's political liberalism relies on an epistemologically abstracted or atomised self (Sandel, Reference Sandel1998), it certainly relies on an abstracted status of citizenship, with the bundle of rights and statuses it entails being derived solely from the ‘political conception of the person’ as ‘free and equal’, and as enjoying the ‘powers of moral personality’.
Political liberalism, then, can accommodate a commitment of national identity only insofar as its content and scope respects the ‘modelled constraints’ of the original position. Thus, it must be confined to the domain of the political. But this encounters basic problems of justification. On the one hand, it raises the problem of stability as already discussed in the French republican context. On the other, the justificatory constraints introduced by the liberal principle of legitimacy raise the question of how the separateness, and thus the legitimacy, of the state can be established (Barnard, Reference Barnard1983). This ignores the legitimation of the people itself as distinct from the legitimation of the constitution and the public philosophy. Näsström notes that, for Rawls in particular, the legitimacy of the people itself is often taken as a necessary axiom of political theory because ‘it refuses political theorization’ (Reference Näsström2007, p. 624).
This evokes Habermas's (Reference Habermas, Habermas, Cronin and de Greiff1999) description of the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of national identity in republican politics: the polity is to be legitimated with reference to a contract that transcends citizens' non-political commonalities, yet its membership in practice is inevitably determined through these very criteria. It will operate as an organic, not an abstract, community, in practice if not at the level of constitutional principle (Baubérot, Reference Baubérot2006, p. 112). Thus the abstract republican ‘people’ theoretically gives itself a constitution which is defined in abstracted and univeralist terms, but this sets aside the legitimation of the people itself, with its various boundaries, delineations and exclusions. Political liberalism and republican universalism both set aside the fundamental question: ‘Who gets to be included in the people?’ (Näsström, Reference Näsström2007, p. 624).
The problem of stability is perhaps more salient in political liberalism's treatment of national identity. In general terms, stability refers to the need for normative political theory to provide an account of how the relevant principles can find support, and become internalised in citizens' motivations and dispositions, and thus be actualised in institutional and social life with a reasonable degree of consistency. In The Law of Peoples (Reference Rawls1999), Rawls assumes that the solidarities necessary to political justice could not be sustained on the scale of a self-constituting global ‘people’. This is portrayed as part of the ‘circumstances of justice’ – the social and empirical horizons within which political justice must be implemented. In Rawls's account (Reference Rawls1996), stability in the liberal state can be provided by the ‘overlapping consensus’ that forms amongst reasonable citizens who can endorse the public conception of justice from within their own comprehensive doctrines. However, arguably, a political conception of justice that is excessively abstracted from national particularisms and specificities will struggle to obtain the requisite support and allegiance. Thus, the legitimation that is achieved through the abstract character of a political conception of justice tends correspondingly to undermine its stability.
However, this problem is easily overstated. The ‘modelled constraints’ of the original position – and indeed, the ‘universalism’ of the republican tradition – can arguably accommodate a robust civic patriotism which, although eschewing religious and ethnic criteria, is nonetheless contextually and even nationally specific – in its folkloric, ritualistic and historical references. Republican universalism, although averse to exclusionary narratives about ‘origins’, can, and indeed must, embrace local and particular stories, about politics and self-government, which are specific and contingent but could nonetheless be embraced and internalised by ‘outsiders’. For Habermas, again, memories and passions play a role in providing a ‘shared political culture that is strong enough to turn strangers into fellow citizens’ (Baumeister, Reference Baumeister2007, p. 484). Thus, national specificity may arguably be reconciled with political liberalism's abstracted vision of the social contract. The stability of, and citizens' adherence to, the ‘political’ terms of the social contract might be generated by an institutional and civic mythology which is specific to the experience of a particular national community – including, for example, collective memories pertaining to revolution, independence and constitutional ‘moments’ – but which do not violate the liberal principle of legitimacy in that they are capable of being celebrated and endorsed by diverse people independently of their ‘origins’. A universalist conception of justice might consistently deploy particularist folkloric rituals and buttresses. This somewhat echoes Habermas's conception of political legitimation as ‘a tradition-building project’ (Reference Habermas, Habermas, Cronin and de Greiff1999, p. 111).
Republican stability might also require the promotion of various virtues, which in turn presents a challenge to pluralism and religious freedoms at least insofar as this leads to certain religious and cultural practices being problematised. Political liberalism generally eschews the promotion of personal liberal virtues, the ‘comprehensive liberalisms of Kant and Mill’ (Rawls, Reference Rawls1996, p. 99). However, some republicanisms, at least, endorse the promotion of participative dispositions and virtues seen as necessary both to the exercise of public reason and deliberation, and to the prevention of domination in social life (Maynor, Reference Maynor2002; Daly, Reference Daly2011). French republicanism is associated with a relatively ‘thick’ construction of civic identity and the public self; thus, Laborde notes, ‘if the republic was to create “citizens” out of “believers”, it had to engage in a strong formative project, aimed at the inculcation of the public values of democratic and egalitarian citizenship … so as to lead citizens to endorse a robust public identity capable of transcending more particular … loyalties’ (Reference Laborde2005, p. 316).
3.1 Gender, domination and virtue in the republican tradition
In turn, this tension has a peculiar translation in the context of gender equality. On the one hand, since political liberalism confines the regulatory scope of the principles of justice to the ‘basic structure’ of institutional life, feminists charge it with overlooking the significance of power disparities embedded within ‘private’ familial and associational contexts. On Okin's account (Reference Okin1989), for example, Rawlsian justice overlooks power relations within the family. On the other hand, republicanism is often associated with a more interventionist politics in ‘private’ realms, being concerned to project and concretise its values well beyond the institutional public realm. In turn, this has a strong connection to gender politics, specifically republican discourses concerning emancipation, non-domination and religion. This is especially salient in the French context, where gender equality has recently been emphasised as figuring amongst a cluster of key ‘national values’. In particular, laïcité is thought to promote gender equality, as women are guaranteed an equal citizenship that is abstracted not only from their gender identity, but also from any essentialised religious identity that might be assigned to them through a ‘differentialist’ politics of recognition. Gender domination, in the republican lens, is combated by assigning religion to a private status. While this echoes Rawls's formulation of a right of persons ‘to view [themselves] as independent from and not identified with any particular conceptions of the good, or scheme of final ends’ (Reference Rawls2001, p. 21), it receives a particularly sharp and uncompromising translation in the French context, and one which is subject to instrumentalisation and abuse in a broader politics of membership and belonging. Like Rawlsian political liberalism, French republican discourse claims to dissociate citizenship and national identity from ‘comprehensive’ or ‘non-institutional’ identities (Kahn, Reference Kahn2007).
However, in recent years at least, the specificity of French republican political thought with respect to gender politics lies in its claim to expansively deploy a coercive emancipatory power against religious and cultural practices seen as sources of domination and unfreedom. A laïcité understood merely as state neutrality, connected to an abstract, universalist conception of citizenship, is thought insufficient to guarantee the equal liberty of women in the face of (presumed) infra-communitarian and familial domination. This reflects a broader scepticism concerning the sufficiency of consent in the context of religious and cultural context, and a concern for domination as well as coercion of religious choice (Daly, Reference Daly2012). This raises the broader theoretical problem of how state power may be deployed to counteract private domination without itself representing an unwelcome form of oppression – and moreover, as Mullally (this issue) and Enright (this issue) consider, what other agendas or assumptions such emancipative projects may conceal. Vakulenko notes ‘a long-standing feminist tradition in France of radically opposing Islamic dress as a form of “psychological, sexual and social mutilation”’ (Reference Vakulenko2009, p. 148). In the discourse surrounding both the recent prohibition on the ‘full veil’, as well as the 2004 prohibition on religious attire in public schools, French republicanism was thus portrayed as entailing a more ambitious project of gender emancipation than the neutralist liberalisms of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world (Palais de l'Elysée, 2003). On this narrative, gender equality cannot be secured merely by affirming a religiously neutral public sphere and a universalist conception of citizenship which rejects any ‘differentialist’ recognition. Instead, a more plausible conception of republican citizenship requires robust state intervention to counteract private sites of domination.
However, whatever the theoretical nuances of freedom as non-domination in republican thought, in real-world politics this discourse of non-domination has, in practice, inevitably served as something of a façade for a cruder politics of belonging – fixated on Islam and immigration and selectively problematising minority practices. It is true that rights of exit, contestation and voice within religious and cultural communities might require various forms of background state support and even state intervention, particularly to alleviate the power disparities that allow the exercise of formal liberal rights to be constrained through invigilation and intimidation. However, the French debate has been fixated on a quasi-civilisation struggle against the presumed symbols of gender oppression in the public square, and republican terminologies have thus been co-opted by an anxious nativist politics. Conversely, there has been insufficient attention paid to the socio-economic dimensions of freedom as non-domination – in particular to the various goods, capacities and resources that might be required to facilitate the exercise of undominated religious choice in various contexts (Daly, Reference Daly2012).
IV Islam, gender and the French national identity debate
In the autumn of 2009, the Minister for Immigration and National Identity, Eric Besson, launched a ‘great debate’ on national identity. This represented a key initiative of the Sarkozy presidency. It took the form of a series of town hall style debates under the aegis of Besson's ministry. He cast this initiative as grounding ‘a renewal of the republican pact’,Footnote 15 while Sarkozy lamented that national identity had become a taboo subject, a ‘dirty word’ (Bonal and Equy, Reference Bonal and Equy2009). A renewed emphasis on national identity, he said, could represent a ‘rampart against communitarianism’ (Bonal and Equy, Reference Bonal and Equy2009). He had already declared, appropriating a National Front theme, that immigrants should ‘love France or leave it’,Footnote 16 and later declared multiculturalism a ‘failure’ (Fréour, Reference Fréour2011). The theme of balkanisation, segregation and civic fragmentation loomed large in the debate: Fillon, the prime minister, affirmed ‘“France” is not the expression of a race. But it will never be a juxtaposition of communities obeying their own rules and retreating within themselves’ (Descola, Reference Descola2009).
Although, for a while, this became a key theme of the Sarkozy presidency, it aroused opposition and scepticism in at least a section of the political and intellectual Left, which depicted it as a cynical move to appropriate the anti-immigrant terrain of the National Front.Footnote 17 It was broadly critiqued as abusively subsuming the question of ‘national identity’ within a broader discourse on immigration and integration.
The anti-veiling polemic of 2009 and 2010 must be viewed against the backdrop of this renewed political focus on national identity, which occurred roughly over the same period. The face-veiling law, which came into force in April 2011, was defended using a number of distinctive normative principles. First, it was rationalised with reference to the value of gender equality, and the concern that the republican state should take a stand against the symbols of gender oppression in the public square. Second, it was motivated by an idea that the much-cherished principle of laïcité, or secularism, should preclude ‘ostentatious’ or threatening displays of religious affiliation in the public square. Third, the imperative of republican civility – or what the prominent feminist Elisabeth Badinter bizarrely described, to the parliamentary inquiry, as the ‘obligation of fraternity’ (French National Assembly, 2010, p. 335) – precluded the practice of hiding one's identity in public. Fourth, under pressure from the resurgent National Front, the ‘full’ veil was depicted by the government as an ostentatious marker of difference or segregation, an indication of the creeping ‘balkanisation’ or ‘communautarisation’ of French society (Descola, Reference Descola2009). On this narrative, cultural integration required the abandonment of cultural or religious practices perceived as alienating and threatening to ‘French values’. Therefore, curiously, the rationale for the law had a dual character, both emancipatory and disciplinary. The republic would emancipate veiled women from pressures and domination imposed within family and community – but simultaneously the law would impose an obligation to temper one's religious expression in the public square for the sake of social cohesion. Thus, in effect, the discourse on national identity became subtly intertwined with the defence of a dominant non-political identity, and not merely the universal abstract principles of the republican state.
Additionally, the national identity debate crystallised various ambiguities in the role and use of gender equality within the French public philosophy. Durand notes that ‘from the first headscarf controversies in 1989 to the appearance of burqa twenty years later, the debates on religious dress have been a powerful catalyst for the re-appropriation of a republican identity’ (Reference Durand2010, p. 19). Indeed, it has been claimed that the aforementioned Mme M. decision, noted above, recognised gender equality as ‘a foundational value of the French Republic, on a par with laïcité’ (Vakulenko, Reference Vakulenko2009, p. 148).
In particular, the anti-veiling polemic, in its appeal to laïcité and gender equality, raised the question of the regulative role of ‘national values’ across intimate, associational and ‘private’ spheres. On the one hand, laïcité and gender equality alike were increasingly seen as having a regulatory role for private conduct, rather than constitutional principles in the narrow sense, and thus became leitmotifs in the politics of culture and identity – sometimes even co-opted, incongruously by the far Right. Concurrently, the concept of national identity itself seemed to embrace the non-political dimensions of common identity. This reflects Honohan's observation that European politics has retreated not only from normative multiculturalism, but also from liberal neutrality: ‘there seems to be a new demand for national or cultural commonality among citizens’ (Reference Honohan, Neill and Schwedler2007, p. 64).
This was exemplified by the fact that the French national identity discourse was in practice disproportionately focused on the civic duties of members of minority groups, particularly Islam. A UMP debate on the compatibility of Islam with laïcité was staged quick on the heels of the national identity debate. Although historically and constitutionally laïcité was understood as a principle of church–state separation and state neutrality, with no regulative role for private conduct, it was invoked to problematise Muslim practices such as minaret construction and street prayers. Thus it was increasingly understood as precluding the conspicuous presence of minority religious affiliations, specifically, in public spaces. Marine Le Pen, the new leader of the National Front, described street prayers as a ‘foreign occupation’, and called for religious dress to be banned in all public spaces, invoking laïcité (Sopo, Reference Sopo2010). In a caricatural rendition of the polemic on minarets, a group of UMP parliamentarians even evoked laïcité to condemn the decision of a major hamburger chain, Quick, to convert some of its branches to halal meat, with this soon followed by controversy surrounding Muslim street prayers in Parisian suburbs.Footnote 18 In the end, however, the UMP symposium on Islam and laïcité passed rather quietly.Footnote 19 The party set down a parliamentary resolution on laïcité,Footnote 20 albeit without amending the much-cherished 1905 law of separation, and the discourse on Islam and laïcité became muted under the socialist government which assumed power in 2012.
4.1 Secularism, national identity and ‘duties of discretion’
As noted, laïcité has increasingly been interpreted in an expansionary sense as requiring not merely a religiously neutral state, but a public sphere free of strong markers of religious identity. Thus, the conspicuous manifestation of religious identity in public spaces, whether individually or collectively, is now widely understood as contravening the principle. Durand notes a widespread confusion as to the subject of the secular ‘public’ – as to whether laïcité applies to the institutional state–religion relationship alone, or requires citizens to refrain from ‘ostentatious’ – although judicially ‘private’ – manifestations of religious identity in the public square of society, rather than merely the institutional space of the state (Reference Daly2010, p. 40). She suggests this tendency is borne of a peculiar ‘bourgeois habitus’ of ‘obliged discretion’, which nonetheless has ‘no real legal or constitutional foundation’ (p. 40). This was borne out by Sarkozy's appeal for ‘discretion’ on the part of French Muslims following the Swiss referendum prohibiting minarets in November 2009. He implored ‘respect for those welcoming as well as for those arriving’, and while recognising the need for adequate facilities in which to undertake worship and prayer, called on French Muslims to ‘refrain from any ostentation or provocation, being conscious of the luck they enjoy to live in a land of liberty, practicing their faith in a humility borne not of the feebleness of their convictions, but rather out of fraternal respect for those who think differently’ (Sarkozy, Reference Sarkozy2009). Durand, however, opines: ‘we do not cease to have a private existence and rights linked to our private personality once we step into a place characterised “public” … French society has committed the error of interpreting the “privatisation” of religious convictions, conceived originally as underpinning freedom of choice, as entailing an obligation of discretion’ (Reference Durand2010, pp. 30, 32). She makes the case that the ‘schizophrenic’ confusion in laïcité's delineation of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ undermines any claim to its theoretically or conceptually distinctive nature. In any case, in its recast role as a regulative principle for ‘ostentatious’ private religious behaviours, laïcité came to represent a unifying exhortation to cohesion and alikeness, invoked to shore up a majoritarian non-political identity. Indeed, the broader national identity debate was replete with reference to immigrants' duty to secularise their habits in order to effectively integrate in the national community.Footnote 21 In this lens, both laïcité and ‘national identity’ were repackaged as criteria of cultural belonging for membership of the national community – a community which, Sarkozy reminded the public, had ‘Christian roots’ (Sarkozy, Reference Sarkozy2009).
Indeed, the understanding of laïcité as requiring Muslims to exercise discretion in publicly exercising their faith lacked conceptual or theoretical coherence. The conception of laïcité which prevailed in the 1905 law of separation of churches and state was widely regarded as a liberal solution to the church–state question, as it guaranteed private religious autonomy and freedom of conscience while prohibiting establishment or endowment of religion (Daly, Reference Daly2010). Indeed, Article 10 of the 1789 Declaration (which currently has constitutional effect) states: ‘No one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with public order.’ The face-veiling law enacted in 2010 does not prohibit the burqa or niqab or even religious garb as such, as this would be unconstitutional. Rather, it obliquely targets the ‘full veil’ by specifying a general prohibition and then exempting a range of uses other than religious uses.Footnote 22 Yet, in the surrounding discourse, it was religious face-covering, specifically, which was deemed to be contrary to national values. Yet those same values, embodied in the Constitution, precluded any attempt to target religious face-coverings as such, forcing recourse to a rather oblique legislative strategy. Durand captures this paradox neatly: ‘Why this allergy to signs of those very differences to which the Republic declares itself indifferent?’ (Reference Durand2010, p. 20).
Thus, historically and constitutionally, laïcité – and the republican social compact – merely required the state to remain indifferent to the religious motivation of private conduct, neither privileging or exempting religious practice, nor, however, specifically targeting it as such. Yet, in the understanding that has crystallised over the past decade, laïcité assumes a direct regulative role for private religious manifestations and it problematises the mere fact of religions' public visibility (at least in relation to minority religions). Then laïcité, like ‘national identity’ itself, would require symbolic obeisance in practices traditionally understood as beyond its regulatory remit – although this burden was imposed unevenly. Under this Sarkozian narration, the demand national identity places on those of ‘immigrant origin’ is not merely to accept the universalist, abstract conception of citizenship independent of their origins and particularist identities, but rather to refrain from unsettling the dominant non-political culture by exercising discretion in their religious and cultural practices.
To some extent then, laïcité – at least the form it assumes in public discourse – no longer refers to an institutional arrangement connected normatively to republican self-government; rather it has come to represent, in some respects, an instrument for maintaining forms of non-political commonality or cohesion. Ostensibly it seems there has been a degree of intellectual confusion as to whether laïcité is a liberal principle of neutrality confined to the institutional domain, or in Rawlsian terms a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ with a broader regulatory role. However, the oscillation between contradictory interpretations of laïcité is not primarily the product of some intellectual confusion. Like gender equality, laïcité has been co-opted – as a principle with a seemingly respectable ‘republican’ allure – in the cultural politics of national belonging. Indeed, the political left and civil society boycotted the UMP's debate on Islam and laïcité, objecting that it risked ‘stigmatising’ French Muslims. Accordingly, the government's focus on Islam provoked something of a public backlash. Sarkozy's former ‘diversity adviser’ quipped that French Muslims ‘should wear a green star’ to remind the government of the historical legacy of stigmatisation and victimisation on religious grounds.Footnote 23 As one public commentator objected, self-styled ‘republicans’ tended to denounce requests for accommodationist measures, such as recognition of feast days, as a form of ‘communitarian’ special pleading – yet without acknowledging the existing Christian bias of the ostensibly secular, public calendar. He objected: ‘the majority of French citizens believe that western culture has ceased to be determined by religion, and that only the Other remains impermeable to secularisation. So Christmas and Easter are part of the common culture of all the French, while feasts associated with Islam are seen as particularist expression of ‘communitarianist’ rebellion … [to denounce this] as communitarianism rests on the assumption of Islam as an essentially foreign entity' (Bouzar, Reference Bouzar2011). This resonates with Baubérot's observation that republicanism in France has recently degenerated into a form of ‘majority communitarianism, relative only to itself’ (Reference Baubérot2006, p. 117). The uneven demands for discretion in religious exercise have been exemplified in various overzealous republican claims, for example the demand that imams should preach only in French, or that the 1905 law should be amended to allow for the funding of ‘moderate’ mosques (Laurent, Reference Laurent2011).
Across 2009 and 2010, during the period leading up to the enactment of the veiling law, members of the UMP government continually problematised Islam in relation to national identity. Although couched in ‘republican’ terminology, this discourse often emphasised the non-political dimensions of communal belonging, intimating a ‘blood and soil’ conception of nationality and citizenship. For example, civil society groups lodged a police complaint in relation to an intervention by the Minister of the Interior, Claude Guéant, in which he said ‘the growing number of Muslims, and a certain section of their behaviour, causes problems’.Footnote 24 A former Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, was convicted by a lower court for an ostensibly jocular remark in relation to a young UMP militant of North African origin: ‘when you have one of them it's alright, it's when you have too many that it's a problem’ (Franck, Reference Franck2010). One UMP mayor, at a national identity debate, said of Muslims: ‘it is time to react before they gobble us all up’ (Landrin and Van Eeckhout, Reference Landrin and Van Eeckhout2010). In reaction to anecdotes about polygamy amongst Muslims, there was discussion of legislative reform with regard to the removal of nationality for certain offences (Jaxel-Truer and Vincent, Reference Jaxel-Truer and Vincent2010).
In this way, the national identity debate gave stark concrete expression to Baubérot's argument that French republican discourse, whether unconsciously or opportunistically, often disguises majority cultural claims as ‘universalist’ (Reference Baubérot2006). Religious or cultural claims to ‘special’ accommodation – for example, requests for gender-specific swimming sessions in municipal swimming pools, or for female patients not to be treated by male doctors – are fiercely resisted as ‘communitarian’ threats to the universalism of the republican laws and state. Conversely, this ignores that the default standard practices against which exemption is resisted have an arbitrary cultural specificity. Requesting to swim in single-gender company is decried as aggressively ‘particularist’, yet wishing to use gender-divided changing facilities is thought natural, universal and indeed lacking cultural specificity. Yet it is these cultural assumptions which are implicitly protected and shored up by a ‘universalist’ republicanism which is defined partly in relation to the rejection of ‘particularist’ religious–cultural claims. Thus again, universalist abstract conceptions of citizenship are deployed to affirm and shore up a majoritarian cultural identity. Kahn (Reference Kahn2007) has identified an incongruous communitarianism in France's authoritarian ‘new republicans’, hostile to the recognition or accommodation of non-dominant cultural identities. While citizenship and national identity are defined in relation to shared cultural norms or way of life, in the French context this has been expressed obliquely using confused ‘universalist’ terminologies.
4.2 Gender, emancipation and political liberalism
The deployment of gender equality as an essential national value raises fundamental questions concerning the use and limits of state power in both liberal and republican thought. As discussed, political liberalism insists that any emancipatory deployment of state power be justified independently of any particular comprehensive doctrine, including comprehensive liberal doctrines connected to autonomy or Enlightenment humanism (Rawls, Reference Rawls1996; Reference Rawls2001). The state's emancipatory power must be exercised through the provision of goods and resources which can be used to pursue a wide range of reasonable life plans and conceptions of the good, including non-liberal conceptions.
Thus, political liberalism does not necessarily translate to a minimalist ‘hands-off’ conception that can neatly be contrasted with a more emancipatory republican tradition; while insisting that state power must be justified independently of comprehensive doctrines, it does not necessarily preclude public intervention in ‘private’ realms outside the ‘basic structure’ (Daly, Reference Daly2011). Correspondingly, the promotion of gender equality as an official value, including through the use of criminal sanctions, should not automatically be regarded as transgressing the permissible limits of state power within political-liberal thought. Clearly, a robust commitment to promoting gender equality in ‘private spheres’ traditionally untouched by liberal state power does not necessarily rest on any particular ‘comprehensive’ doctrine but can be justified instead based on a ‘political’ conception of justice defined independently of any particular conception of the good. The fact that this might seek social transformation beyond the domain of the political is not particularly decisive from this theoretical perspective. A republican campaign for gender equality as a ‘national value’ would, on the other hand, remain compatible with respect for ‘reasonable pluralism’ by deploying and fostering the goods, resources and capacities necessary to enable women themselves to exercise and develop the ‘powers of moral personality’, in particular the power to pursue and revise a conception of the good, ‘over a complete life’. Efforts to alleviate gender domination in ‘private’ relationships marked by unequal bargaining powers do not themselves correspond to a countervailing form of domination insofar as they empower citizens themselves to pursue different life plans and conceptions of the good.
Thus, the theoretical problem in France's use of gender equality as a justificatory basis for prohibitions on certain cultural or religious practices is not necessarily that it amounts to an illegitimate promotion of ‘comprehensive’ Enlightenment doctrines, such as a perfectionist republicanism. Rather, it is problematic first because it seems patently ill-tailored to the promotion of the goods and capacities associated with the political conception of justice, particularly in its focus on the symbols of gender oppression, and the insufficient attention it pays to the socio-economic dimensions of gender domination. Second, it is clearly connected to a conception of national belonging which embraces non-political commonalities and criteria of membership; thus citizenship is defined organically and not politically. Gender equality, then, is tacitly deployed to police the boundaries of cultural belonging within a discourse of national identity which strains the traditionally abstracted republican conception of citizenship. And as already noted, the ‘people’ itself, as distinct from the content of their social contract, cannot be legitimated through any contractualist device. Accordingly, the recent polemic on veiling evokes Kritzman's dark observation that ‘the “national contract” has an unpleasant side that forces an insidious vision of cohesion on the people. As Renan put it, “unity is always effected by means of brutality’'' (Reference Kritzman1995, p. 11).
V Conclusion
Amidst recurrent criticism and scepticism, France's great national identity debate was somewhat quietly jettisoned, before its scheduled conclusion, in 2010. The recommendations arising from the debate centred on minor symbolic initiatives, such as a proposal to have the Marseillaise sung in the public classrooms.Footnote 25 An opinion poll showed a majority viewed the initiative as ‘electoralist’.Footnote 26 The Ministry of National Identity, a key Sarkozian initiative, was abolished in late 2010 (Piquard, Reference Piquard2010). Ostensibly, the national polemic identity ran its course even before the end of the Sarkozy presidency. Yet the anti-veiling law which came into force in 2011 was broadly perceived as having reasserted secularism and gender equality as key ‘national values’. On its surface, the main flaw in this flagship ‘new republican’ policy is the rather naive belief that legislating against ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols, perceived repugnant to gender equality, will in itself emancipate victims of oppression, whether supposed or real. There has been too much focus on the symbolic projection of secular values in the public square, and too little on the positive goods and resources necessary to women's effective exercise of religious choice in ‘private’ spheres. Ultimately, as Viard notes, the ‘retreat of the political’ generally – given the ‘neoliberal turn’ France took in the 1980s under Mitterand, and the crisis of legitimation this posed for the ‘social republic’ – opens a space for an increased focus on cultural and ‘lived’ attributes as an alternative focal point for cementing and legitimating the republican polity. He notes: ‘the weakening of a community whose destiny is predicated on a common political project allows for a forceful resurgence of community affiliations based on origin, colour, religion, status …’ (Reference Vakulenko2010, p. 39). Thus, it is no coincidence that the national identity debate followed upon the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008. This echoed earlier attempts to instrumentalise an exclusionary and introspective appeal to national identity in response to sentiments of insecurity. In one interpretation, the 2004 headscarf law was partly a response to the ‘anguish’ of neoliberalism (Gresh, Reference Gresh2003, p. 19); indeed, Mullally notes that proposals to regulate veiling recently arose in many European states other than France (Reference Mullally2011, p. 29). In this lens, it is important not to attribute any undeserved political or theoretical coherence to the ‘national identity’ movement. Indeed, perhaps the most compelling feature of the ‘national identity’ debate has been the appropriation of republicanism's normative toolkit in the cultural politics of the nationalist right (Durand, Reference Durand2010, p. 13).
