In recent years, there has been much talk of “laïcité,” that variant of secularism so particular to modern France, and claims about Muslims have played a central role. Although a number of scholars explore how recent international developments and longer colonial histories frame these debates,Footnote 1 the ways that mid-20th-century Middle Eastern and North African actors and contexts have shaped French laïcité up to the present day have been largely ignored. When invoked, they are reduced either to diplomatic maneuvering—whether France's “Arab strategy” or links between France and Israel/Palestine—or burdensome memories, notably around traumatic violence during the Algerian Revolution (1954–62).Footnote 2 In the era of decolonization, this article shows, challenges that echoed across the Mediterranean transformed French certainties as well as altered laws and institutions. The Algerian war resituated the meaning of “Muslims” and “Jews” in France in relation to religion and “origins” and this process reshaped French secular nationhood, with Algerian independence in mid-1962 crystallizing a complex and shifting debate that began in the interwar period and blossomed between 1945 and 1962. In its failed efforts to keep all Algerians French, the French government responded to both Algerian nationalism and, as is less known, Zionism, and did so with policies that took seriously, rather than rejected, the so-called ethnoreligious arguments that they embraced—and that, according to existing scholarship, have always been anathema to French laïcité. Most scholars on France continue to presume that its history is national or wholly “European” and its religious references Catholic. Yet paying attention to this transnational confrontation, driven by claims from Algeria and Israel, emphasizes the crucial roles of North African and Mediterranean developments as well as of Muslim and Jewish questions in the making of contemporary France.
Among its many effects, Algeria's war of independence catalyzed and altered French understandings of the relationship between religion and the republic. After 1918, longstanding French “republican” hostility to political claims made in the name of religion focused increasingly on those that conjoined references to “ethnicity” and religion, notably in Zionist arguments. After World War II, however, such claims came to seem less threatening. Faced with the Algerian Revolution, the French Republic proved quite willing to rely on origin-based and religious identities to promote policies meant to keep Algeria French. When France finally accepted Algerian independence, not only did this recent history of grappling in novel ways with ethnic and religious identities disappear but French laws and presumptions defined Algerian “Muslims” as members of an ethnic group and thus alien to French identity. The same laws and understandings referred to Algerian Jews as French people whose religion was a private matter, compatible with French citizenship. This is not another history of “identity,” for the French decisions I study had little effect on how people identified at the time: multiple contexts, much evidence, and many scholars help explain why in 1962 both the vast majority of Algerians were unconcerned, or even overjoyed, to “lose” their French nationality and Algeria's Jews chose French rather than either Israeli or Algerian nationality.Footnote 3 Instead, this article shows how encounters with what recent scholars name “ethnoreligious nationalisms” redefined how late 20th-century French nationalism and the French state dealt with religion.Footnote 4
With the defeat of French Algeria, the certainty that Islam had “ethnoreligious” implications—while Christianity and Judaism did not—shaped French laws and “republican” presumptions. As Naomi Davidson remarks about 20th-century French discussions of Islam more generally, this “French” understanding of Islam always referenced Algerians.Footnote 5 The category of “ethnoreligious” nationalisms and identities is key to this history because of the complicated ways it functioned in the mid-20th-century confrontation between three nationalisms—French, Algerian, Israeli—over their contradictory claims to encompass inhabitants of Algeria (most, for the first two; Jewish, for the third). The category has been widely deployed in recent analyses of “people of Muslim culture” (and, to a lesser extent, “Judeo-Muslim relations”) in contemporary France. I am not interested in relying on the “ethnoreligious” as an “analytic” category; instead, I historicize it as a “native” category, looking at how it emerged as an analytic category in earlier mid-20th-century French scholarly and political discussions about “Jews” and, equally important, at its absence from contemporaneous French discussions about Algerian nationalism.Footnote 6
At least until 1962, French commentators did not use the term “ethnoreligious” to talk about Algerian nationalists, even as it appeared regularly in discussions about Zionism. Indeed, French commentators ignored or denigrated the very idea of a specifically Algerian nationalism, from its early 20th-century stirrings to Algeria's independence. French intelligence assessments, popular commentators, and scholars dismissed its proponents’ claims (to speak for the “Algerian” people of Algeria, which excluded the “European colonists”) and ridiculed its premises (that this people, formed by a unique encounter of Berbers and Arabs that Islam made possible, formed a distinct nation). When discussing them at all, French critics framed so-called Algerian nationalists as dupes of international conspiracies. Debates about Zionism, as an international movement but most particularly its claims on (Jewish) French citizens, did engage some French intellectuals before 1940. Most were critics, who spoke of Zionism's “ethnoreligious” premises, which they contrasted with French republicanism's “universal” principles. After World War II, and especially after Israeli independence in 1948, Jewish and non-Jewish French commentators, even those who were critical, presumed that Zionism needed to be taken seriously.Footnote 7
Between the end of the World War II and Algeria's independence, the dual challenge posed by these distinct nationalisms—both of which privileged “ethnoreligious” terms over the territorial and legal definitions of national belonging that French republicanism embraced—contoured the ways the French republic dealt with religious and “ethnic” identities. The affirmations of scholars and politicians that a “French model” of the nation-state—dating from the 1789 revolution and coalescing in the 19th century—involves the consistent republican rejection of “origins” or “faith” to explain membership in the nation have obfuscated what actually happened in this recent period.Footnote 8 In the mid-20th century, debates and decisions about national belonging—most notably, who from Algeria was French and why?—saw French republican arguments and laws, supposedly anchored only in legal and territorial facts, unsettled by assertions from Algerian nationalists, on the one hand, and Zionists, on the other, that privileged so-called ethnoreligious criteria.
This shifting history crystallized in late 1961 and 1962, when officials of the French Republic once again took up two religious labels—“Muslims” and “Jews”—to advance or counter policy initiatives related to how their government should treat people from Algeria, all of whom were (in French and international law, if often for “Muslims” not in practice) French citizens. These decisions were related to the imminent victory of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which from its first declaration had rejected French pretensions that all Algerians were French. The FLN's 1 November 1954 Proclamation demanded “an official declaration abrogating the edicts, decrees and laws that present Algeria as a ‘French land,’ which is a denial of the History, the geography, the language, the religion, and the mores of the Algerian people.”Footnote 9 Yet despite the fact that the FLN's triumph forced their hand, French officials sought to avoid any legal acknowledgement that this was the case. There was no “official declaration”; instead there were multiple intersecting decisions that, in the end, had the effect of excluding most Algerians from the French nation. Exclusion rather than recognition is the argument I develop in The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France, yet that book's focus on how “ethnicized racialization” anchored French legal decisions occludes almost any discussion of religious questions (“Islam,” e.g., is not in the index).Footnote 10 At the dawn of Algerian independence, however, religion was crucial to explaining French choices, notably because official explanations at this precise moment denied that religion had any effect on national identity while insisting that origins did. To be from Algeria and defined by religious belonging posed no problem for remaining French; to be part of one distinct ethnic group posed serious problems. In these discussions, however, Algerian “Muslims” appeared as a “nationality” or “ethnicity,” members of a group that was not French because “Muslim” by origin and yet whose relationship to Islam went unspoken; Algeria's Jews were discussed not as a group but as French individuals who each “had a religion,” Judaism.Footnote 11
Questions of inclusions and exclusion went beyond certainties to determine shifts in French laws, which worked to end the right of all “Muslims” and to guarantee that of all “Jews” from Algeria to hold onto French nationality. A 21 July 1962 Executive Decree (which had the force of law) stripped all French citizens with “Koranic law civil status” of their (French) birthright nationality. This included the hundreds of thousands who had worked to keep Algeria French, such as members or veterans of the French Armed Forces; actual and former office holders; French civil servants; and the thousands, so-called harkis and others, who had fled Algeria to metropolitan France after Algeria's independence. For Algeria's Jews, the French government's legal and bureaucratic strategy was the opposite. A law of 28 July 1961 had transformed French citizens with “Mosaic civil law status” into French citizens with French Civil Law Status. French functionaries described this small group of people, the Jews of the Mzab region, as among the “least assimilated” groups in Algeria: they had no patronymics, an indication of how little contact, historically, they had had with the French colonial state compared to other Algerians: they were polygamous; they used repudiation for divorce. Yet not only did this group of Algerian individuals “naturalize” into common law status, they were able to do so with none of the restrictions that had always accompanied such shifts. Most notable was their right to choose their own given names and patronymics, a possibility that had been pointedly denied to Jews entering into French nationality since the Napoleonic Concordat (for example, “naturalizing” Jews had always been prevented from choosing patronymics that referenced places or the Bible).Footnote 12 In 1963, when some Mzabite Jews who had emigrated to Israel sought to “repatriate” to France, the state waived the usual requirements for documentary proof of their identity or their French nationality, and welcomed them as citizens.Footnote 13 The actions favoring the small numbers of Mzabites were emblematic of decisions ultimately taken vis-à-vis the some 120,000 Jews from Algeria, as French officials affirmed that all were French. Efforts by some Zionists and Algerian nationalists to insist that these people were part of other nations—Israel or Algeria—precipitated these choices. Scholars have explored at length how French influences shaped both Zionism and Algerian nationalism.Footnote 14 Since the mid-20th century, however, Israeli and Algerian arguments and actions have shaped French laws and ideologies, too.
LAÏCITÉ AND THE CRISIS OF CATHOLICISM
French republicanism, much scholarship tells us, rejected the idea that people should participate in political life as members of groups, rather than as individuals. Republicans are those who embrace the forms of democratic politics and related understandings of how to organize society that the French Revolution catalyzed and that then took institutional and ideological form over two centuries of struggle to make and keep French government republican. It was the rejection of old-regime “corporations” and “estates” that initially powered the critique of subnational organizations. Yet within France and without, republican polemicists increasingly focused on how religious- and origins-based arguments were irrational, anti-universalist, premodern, and backwards ideologies that impeded people from becoming rational modern individuals. Religious groups, especially the Catholic Church, often appeared as an extreme case of the “corporate” danger to republicanism, because they explicitly privileged faith and established authority as the basis for reaching key decisions, rather than rational, informed, and evidence-based debate between individuals. This understanding among republicans crystallized around the fin-de-siècle Dreyfus Affair, when the fabricated accusation of treason leveled at a Jewish member of the French Army's General Staff resulted in a vicious and wide-ranging confrontation between “the forces of order” (the Catholic Church, the army, and those who celebrated their place in French society) and the “forces of progress” (those who embraced France's revolutionary tradition). The victory of the latter had many effects, but the 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State was the most important and most widely invoked.Footnote 15
The explanatory value of this foundational conflict between “state” and “church” is substantial. Particularly important, although often ignored in current discussions, is that the mechanisms and rules that today make France laïc result from a long history of negotiated truces—which Jean Baubérot ties together as a “pact” between the two antagonists—rather than from any simple principle of separation.Footnote 16 Up to the present day, French laws, including those adopted to advance the most militant versions of laïcité, give a role to (Catholic) Christianity that some might find surprising. The major Catholic holy days—not just Sundays, Good Friday, and Christmas but also Pentecost and Ascension—are national holidays. Almost all schoolchildren have Wednesday afternoons off, because of a law to ensure that they have time to attend Catechism classes.Footnote 17 Although Vatican II (1962–65) tempered the Catholic stricture against eating meat on Friday, all French public school cafeterias still serve fish on Fridays. In certain regions of France, the state has made further adjustments to accommodate local needs, sensibilities, and histories. Today, the most well known are in the eastern departments of Alsace and the Moselle. Because they were under German control between 1871 and 1918, the law of 1905, which excluded religious groups from the operation of public institutions, does not apply there. Public schools in these departments continue to have mandatory classes in religion, taught by members of the clergy.
These accommodations stand out precisely because they are not subtle: they are not efforts to camouflage longstanding religious practices in secular garb—to replace the word “Christmas” with “holiday” to qualify late-December “trimmed” trees, gift-giving ceremonies, pageants and parties, for example—but battles won by proponents of maintaining the presence of certain religious forms in public life. They won these battles in the course of losing the larger war against republicans who opposed allowing religious forms, personnel, and arguments to play a substantial role in public life. The lack of constancy reminds us that, like real wars à la Clausewitz, this was a political struggle, with partial retreats and compromises as important to winning as tactical victories could be to losing.
FRENCH ALGERIA AND LAÏCITÉ
Laws and institutions—marriage, hospitals, schools—were crucial grounds on which the struggle over laïcité took place. Besides Alsace-Lorraine, this struggle was particularly important in another part of France: Algeria. In the decades following the 1830 French invasion of Algiers, which saw the violent conquest and pacification of most of what we now know as Algeria, the new rulers organized several legal systems to govern the people who came under their control: their own, often called “common law,” and the already mentioned “Koranic” law and “Mosaic” law systems. These two systems had existed under Ottoman rule; their maintenance was specified in the 5 July 1830 Agreement of Capitulation that French authorities signed with the defeated leader of Algiers, Husayn Dey, in recognition of their conquest. After initial attempts to sweep the two legal systems away, intense local resistance led French authorities to adhere to the agreement, though they worked actively to reduce the purview of what would eventually be called “local law.” By the 1850s, the Koranic and Mosaic legal systems only had authority over so-called civil status law—marriage, paternity (filiation), divorce, inheritance. In addition, Koranic law courts and jurists only had the authority to judge such cases in the first instance; all appeals, although judged under Koranic law, were to be brought before French courts. Mosaic law courts and jurists had been swept aside, their authority appropriated by French courts. These courts were enjoined to respect Koranic and Mosaic laws and procedures. The French government of Algeria, and more particularly the practice of French jurists, simplified and stultified both legal systems, ignoring the multiple schools and contested interpretations that characterized them; Qurʾanic law, in particular, was cut off from the transnational debates it had always depended on to develop. This left them largely as rigid rule books, written by French authors, rather than vital discursive traditions.Footnote 18
In 1870, the Crémieux Decree forced all Algerians with Mosaic civil status to abandon it; they became French of “common law civil status,” to use a category that appears in post-1945 texts. Already, an 1865 law had affirmed that the people of Algeria were French nationals. This law had also offered a pathway for (adult male) French nationals with Koranic or Mosaic civil status to be “naturalized” as citizens rather than only as nationals, by abandoning the civil status to which they were born and entering into “common law” civil status. Publicists presented the Crémieux Decree as another sign that “the republic” and its universal values had been reborn out of the ashes of the Second Empire (1852–70). Yet it resulted directly from the frustration of deeply republican politicians (most, like Adolphe Crémieux, were also active in Jewish organizations in the metropole) that almost no Algerians with Mosaic civil status had chosen to be naturalized. It removed the possibility of individual choice as it eliminated Mosaic civil law within the territory that, in 1848, had become the three French Algerian departments. After 1870, most Algerian-born Jews were citizens, as were settlers of European origin born to French parents or, after the 1889 French nationality law, born on French territory, which included Algeria. The caveat was that between 1876 and 1961, the Jews of the Mzab—an area declared French after 1870 and thus not automatically affected by the Crémieux Decree—had Mosaic civil law status; like “Muslims,” they had French nationality and gained legal citizenship only in 1946.Footnote 19
In the colonial rule of Algeria, as this brief summary suggests, the law had a privileged place in ongoing French efforts to transform the people of Algeria. Again and again, French officials in Algeria affirmed that regular contact with French law and jurists would inevitably lead local people to recognize the superiority of a system that, they had no doubt, was fairer, more rational, and, in short, superior. They would abandon their identity as part of “backwards” or “feudal” groups, defined by origin or religion, and seek to become French “individuals.” In parallel, the slow consolidation of the Third Republic—which emerged during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), took hold in the late 1870s, and lasted until the German conquest of France in 1940—saw repeated affirmations that France had to reject laws and rules that defined French people on the basis of origins or religion. Such standards anchored larger arguments by republicans that the institutions they sought to build were inspired by universal principles. This, republican writers noted, was in sharp distinction to antirepublican French reactionaries as well as rival foreign states, notably the U.K. and Germany, which explicitly relied on religion, race, and origins in their laws and in the propaganda celebrating their “nations” and forms of government. This contest with other European nationalisms is central to most accounts of how French “republican” and “laïc” nationalism developed, notably that offered by Hannah Arendt. Yet, although ignored by Arendt and most subsequent scholars, some of the clearest institutional evidence for republican pretensions involved Algeria: both the Crémieux Decree and the 1889 Law on Nationality actively embraced people who, in Algeria, lived on French soil and were raised in contact with French institutions as French citizens, despite their religious attachments, in the first instance, or foreign (European) origins, in the second.Footnote 20
Neither law, of course, made French citizens of the vast majority of Algerians—those called “Arabs, “Berbers,” “Muslims,” or indigènes—despite the fact that they had French nationality and lived on the territory of the French Republic. Indeed, the paucity of rules and institutional reforms toward this end gives the measure of how little belief in and/or desire for such an outcome existed among men of influence. Much historical work carefully demonstrates how racism, ethnocentrism, Orientalism, and fear of Islam—along with greed and the power of monied interests—constantly reaffirmed this exclusion, and traces its devastating effects on most Algerians’ lives, health, livelihood, educational possibilities, and hopes. Yet, over the course of the Third Republic, French officials and politicians explained that this unequal status, too, was consonant with republican principles.Footnote 21
To be a citizen was to stand in the same relationship to the law as all other citizens. The French nationals in question, however, had “Koranic civil law status,” and this difference in legal status was the most widely used public explanation for why this group of adult males could not exercise citizenship. Since they did not stand as private individuals before the republic's law in “civil law” matters, they could not participate in its elaboration. It was not because they were Arabs or Berbers and it was not because their religion was Islam: it supposedly was because of their legal status, which happened to be anchored in religious texts and teachings. To further demonstrate that the system was consonant with republicanism, officials noted that it was individual descent, rather than religion, race, or group membership, that explained why these male French nationals were not citizens. The most famous example of how this worked was a 1930s French court rejection of a suit by Berbers who had converted to Catholicism and sought entry into “common law status” because they were not Muslims: it was the legal status of their parents that defined their civil law status, the ruling announced, not their religion. To leave Koranic civil law status required a successful application to the republic (as governed by the laws of 1865 and 1919), not a renunciation of Islam.Footnote 22
One constant in these claims was the argument that French “respect” for the choice of indigènes to remain under the empire of “local law status” explained why “Koranic civil law status” still existed. “Qualified” Algerians could leave this status and, thus, enter citizenship. This announced attachment to individual desires, of course, had been ignored repeatedly in Algeria—most dramatically, at the level of legal status, in the Crémieux Decree, not to mention during the violent conquest of Algeria—and for that matter, in all of the extensive legal assimilation practices republicans pursued in the metropole. Yet republican leaders and French officials paid little attention to the incoherence or lack of constancy in their own claims. They preferred to focus their critique on the “feudal” and “backwards” traditions and beliefs of Algeria's Muslims, forms of group thinking and pressure which they described as the primary impediments to individuals making the choice to abandon “Koranic civil law status.” Proposals to bring more Algerian men into the ranks of full citizens, by allowing them to hold onto “at least aspects of Koranic civil status,” were met with intense opposition. Any such liberalization, “European” voices from Algeria insisted, “would fossilize Algerians in their Muslim law, their communitarian institutions, their ‘querelles de minarets.’” These critiques, as French historian Gilbert Meynier describes, “were expressed in terms of a commitment to ‘assimilation’ and in defense of ‘laïcité.’”Footnote 23
ETHNORELIGIOUS NATIONALISMS AND THE FRENCH REPUBLIC: THE ALGERIAN NATION
The emergence of Algerian nationalism directly targeted these confused French explanations for why French nationality did not coincide with the exercise of citizenship for most Algerians, especially the odd pretense that, as far as the republic was concerned, “Muslim” was a legal status. Almost all critics of French rule in Algeria berated the hypocrisy of official claims; they targeted French efforts around citizenship to distance Algerians from Islam as well as to subsume the practice of Islam to state control. For many of Algeria's Muslim religious leaders and Muslims more generally, to abandon “Muslim” status in order to become a full citizen was to become an apostate; there were numerous cases of denied religious burials and other indications that most leaders of the religious community and many other Algerian Muslims did not recognize the claims of fidelity to Islam made by “assimilated” Muslims.Footnote 24 Raberh Achi, in his analysis of one important nationalist movement, the Association des oulémas (Jamaʿat al-ʿUlamaʾ), and its calls for the French government to enact the separation of Muslim religious organizations from state control (i.e., laïcité), describes how the association “highlighted the contradiction between this Republic so quick to affirm laïcité as its dogma in the metropole yet ready to render it meaningless in Algeria whenever control of the indigenous population was at stake.” Concerns about the place of Islam motivated many Arabs and Berbers to challenge French rule; growing numbers invoked the Algerian nation to explain their goals.Footnote 25
The definitions of the Algerian nation that crystallized in early nationalist debates were at the intersection of religious/Islamic affiliation and ethnicity. This has led recent scholars to assert that Algerian nationalism was “ethnoreligious” in character from the beginning. With this claim, they critique an existing historiography (deeply influenced, it must be noted, by French republican certainties) arguing that “ethnic” and religious references emerged only in the 1930s and corrupted earlier forms of Algerian nationalism. James McDougall shows that early nationalist texts and statements articulated a unique Algerian personality, an alloy of Islam and the particular ethnic heritage of Algeria's Arab and Berber peoples forged through history.Footnote 26 Such claims took on increasing precision during World War I and the early 1920s, he argues, in polemical disputes about the place of Algeria's Kabyle and other Berber populations vis-à-vis its “Arabs.” They became foundational to other strands of nationalist politics in the 1930s, especially after the reformist intellectual and politician Ferhat Abbas catalyzed debates about the existence of an “Algerian nation” with his infamous 1936 claim that “I have interrogated history; I have interrogated the living and the dead; I have visited cemeteries. No one spoke to me of the Algerian nation.”Footnote 27
Disputes among Algerian nationalists, anticolonialists, and reformers over the existence, history, and definition of the “Algerian nation” were often intense and always multivocal. Yet French commentators, almost without exception, simply ignored or dismissed them all. Before 1914, there were infrequent but regular warnings in the French Algerian press about Pan-Islamism and “Muslim nationalism.” In the years after the Great War, French critics transformed these into far more frequent attacks on “Arab nationalism.” This was the primary charge against the period's most prominent Algerian political figure, the Emir Khaled. Some French Algerian newspapers even sought to link his “Arab nationalism” with “Bolshevism.”Footnote 28 During the 1920s, claims of a specifically Algerian identity began to coalesce in the arguments of small numbers of Algerian “Muslim” elites. Yet French analysts continued to argue that extra-Algerian links, not Algerian nationalism, motivated actions that they deemed anti-French and/or dangerous.
Several republican certainties help explain French commentators’ inability to respond to pressing evidence that Algerian nationalism existed. One had to do with the terms Algerian nationalists (and protonationalists) used. As Meynier writes, in reference to even relatively informed French responses, “the fact that Algerian nationalism was articulated through frames foreign to the French conception of the nation” and the lack “of concepts that corresponded to French concepts” together “led observers to deny that it was nationalism.”Footnote 29 Notably, republican rejection of origin- and religious-based nationalisms—which had developed historically against French, British, and German opponents—was joined with almost total ignorance of or disdain for specifically Islamic models and political thinking. More broadly, over the course of the interwar period, as Martin Thomas puts it, “French governments, Algiers officials and the settler lobby still maintained that Algeria was a French construction built on virgin soil from the administrative chaos of the Ottoman era . . . ”Footnote 30 Even the French political organization that had expressed the most sympathy with at least one branch of Algerian nationalism in the interwar years, the French Communist Party (PCF), forthrightly avoided the claims of Messali Hadj—who came to lead the first nationalist proindependence movement, the Etoile nord-africaine, founded in 1926—or any other Algerian about what defined the Algerian nation. This was clearly visible in PCF leader Maurice Thorez's 1937 argument that Algerians were merely a “nation-in-formation,” which like the French nation would fuse diverse ethnic groups into a whole defined by a unique secular vision and, once formed, would leave religion to the side.Footnote 31
ETHNORELIGIOUS NATIONALISMS AND THE FRENCH REPUBLIC: ZIONISM
Such silence was not inevitable. During these same years, a set of terms and categories emerged in France that, in retrospect, seems ready-made to both speak of and criticize Algerian nationalism. As noted, between 1789 and 1914, French republicans grew increasingly univocal in their opposition to any political and public recognition of identities anchored in either religious belief or origins (“racial” or “ethnic”). Yet it was not until the interwar period that French anxieties about the potential intersection of “origins” and “religion” were clearly articulated. This happened in the context of discussions about Zionism among a small number of French historians and critics, who elaborated the concept nationalisme ethnico-réligieux (ethnoreligious nationalism) to speak of Jews. Interwar discussions in France about Zionism and about Jews and Palestine more broadly repeatedly referred to an “ethnoreligious” community or nation, notably, in numerous studies of ancient Hebrew and Roman Palestine. As the Jesuit theologian Joseph Sirven wrote in the first volume of Palestinian Judaism in the Time of Jesus Christ (1934), “it was this ethno-religious nationalism . . . that allowed Judaism always to continue to exist as a nation.”Footnote 32
As French critics noted, Zionist arguments for an “ethnoreligious” Jewish identity differed markedly from central tenets of French republicans, which most French Jewish leaders passionately embraced. What scholars term “Franco-Judaism” shared the certainty that religious attachments and belief were acceptable, so long as they were confined to the private sphere and excluded from politics. Zionist political leaders in Palestine, however, as they worked to create an independent Jewish homeland, took up ethnoreligious definitions. Alain Dieckhoff details how, in their effort “to determine membership in the Jewish people,” the founders of the State of Israel “adopted de jure the religious criterion alone.” Even though these men and women, he argues, “wanted to found a largely secular identity . . . there was always agreement on an ethnic definition of the Jewish people which coincided closely with the religious definition.”Footnote 33 Such arguments, scholars such as Annette Wieviorka and Esther Benbassa note, found little purchase in France, as “Franco-Judaism remained the primary frame of reference for French Jews throughout the interwar period.” Yet texts from this period that invoke Jewish “ethnoreligious nationalism” support the more nuanced claims of more recent scholars of French Jewry, such as Nadia Malinovich. She notes that, despite the ongoing hegemony of “Franco-Judaism,” there were many self-identified Jews and Jewish groups in France who, alongside Zionists, sought to articulate definitions of Jewish identity that had public, even political, implications, rather than accept that they must remain wholly “private.” (The role of immigrants, notably those who primarily spoke languages other than French, was especially important.) The term “ethnoreligious,” even when used in critiques of Zionism, made clear that a discussion not restricted to republican prescriptions was taking place.Footnote 34
In the post-1945 period there was an increasing willingness to affirm forms of Jewish specificity that could not be collapsed into religion, which crystallized with Israeli independence.Footnote 35 In addition, over the course of the 1950s, French discussions about Zionism increasingly expanded beyond a “Jewish” public, however defined. In a context where Paris developed a close and supportive relationship with Tel Aviv—including such markers as the joint attack on Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis and the commerce in nuclear and other types of advanced weaponry—and where French intellectuals engaged with analyses both of the place of religion in public life and the role and causes of anti-Semitism in Europe, many discussions about Zionism appeared in forums such as Le Monde, Temps modernes, and Esprit.Footnote 36 French scholars continued to deploy the concept of ethnoreligious nationalism; in the late 1960s, the well-known Group for Religious Sociology, founded by Gabriel Le Bras, categorized all of its work on Judaism under the rubric “An Ethno-Religion.”Footnote 37
DENYING ALGERIAN NATIONALISM, 1945–62
After World War II, French commentators and officials continued to studiously avoid serious engagement with Algerian nationalism, denying its complexity and even its existence. This was despite the fact that French discussions about Zionism as an “ethnoreligious nationalism” grew increasingly substantial between World War I and the late 1950s. When confronted with nationalist demonstrations at the end of World War II—most spectacularly those for Algerian independence on 8 May 1945 in the Constantinois region, which included a number of deadly attacks followed by a murderous official crackdown—metropolitan political parties and politicians relied on settler and official sources in Algeria that, bizarrely enough, led them to interpret nationalist demonstrations on “Victory in Europe Day” as a pro-Nazi plot. (Already in February 1945, a Communist Party leader described “the pseudo-nationalists of [Messali Hadj's] PPA” as “troublemakers and dupes of the Hitlerian services.”) In debates during the Constitutional Assemblies of 1946 and in parliament, politicians loudly and disdainfully rejected the efforts of nationalist politicians from Algeria to advance claims for autonomy and independence. Between 1947 and 1954, according to historian Jean-Charles Jauffret, the French intelligence services in Algeria (the Deuxième bureau), like their colleagues in the metropole (Service de liaisons nord-africaines), “never used the term ‘nation,’ or for that matter the word ‘nationalism’” in reference to the groups that they spied on in Algeria or that were concerned with Algeria in the metropole. In discussions in the French press during the weeks after the 1 November 1954 launch of the FLN's Algeria-wide military campaign for independence, as Zahir Inhaddadden shows, “there is not a single reference to Algerian nationalism, except for one timid reference to the nationalist leadership in the newspaper Combat.”Footnote 38
Over the next several years, as FLN actions expanded, even the most reticent French commentators found it necessary to discuss “Algerian nationalism.” Most did so to discredit it, with a focus on ethnic and religious references and arguments that Algeria's “so-called nationalists” were driven by an unexamined and deadly mix of “religious fanaticism” and “racism.” In 1954, the historian Hubert J. Deschamps identified the message of the most well-known nationalist leader, Messali Hadj, as an amalgam of “religious and xenophobic fanaticism and proletarian emancipation”; in 1955, the new governor-general of Algeria argued that “a theocratic and racist state” was the goal of the FLN; in 1957, ex-General Alphonse Juin qualified nationalist action as resulting from an “unhealthy surge of racism and religious fanaticism”; and the pamphleteer Maurice Candas rejected attempts “to speak of Algerian nationalism, when it is nothing more than pan-Arabism, which is to say fanaticism spiced up with racism.” Besides the repetitive and self-serving nature of the twinned claim, what is particularly noteworthy is how it intersected with key innovations in government policy.Footnote 39
THE REPUBLICAN “INTEGRATIONIST” EMBRACE OF ETHNICITY AND RELIGION
After 1945, and most dramatically during the first years of the Fifth Republic, French governments embraced policies in metropolitan as well as Algerian France that were explicitly linked to religious and ethnic claims and identities. Their immediate goal, of course, was to keep Algeria French. The most innovative approach that officials relied on (one that did not directly employ physical violence) was termed “integration.” Like earlier models for governing the colony, integrationism sought to make Algerians more like French people; what distinguished it, at least in theory, from earlier models (termed “assimilationism,” “associationism,” or “coexistence”) was its claim that a key factor that had kept most Algerians from becoming more French was the discrimination they had suffered from their fellow French nationals. This broke with previous certainties that the main impediment was the reluctance of the vast majority of Algerians to abandon their attachment to what made them “different” (by making the “choice” to abandon Koranic civil law status, for example).Footnote 40
What integrationism authorized most clearly were state policies to address the effects of French racism on most Algerians.Footnote 41 This meant recognizing that in order to achieve real equality, despite longstanding claims to the contrary, it was not enough for governments to establish formal legal equality while pursuing economic growth and justice and, in return, for individuals to abandon any public invocation of nonnational group (e.g., religious or ethnic) membership. Legal equality was something that all Algerians supposedly had—and over the course of the war, French policies made this legal equality more complete—and French politicians, notably on the left, still insisted that economic growth and the extension of social welfare policies to Algerians (along with the elimination of armed rebellion) would solve the Algerian crisis. But integrationism set the stage for policies giving exceptional and temporary forms of targeted state assistance to those Algerians who had suffered the effects of racist discrimination resulting from previous French policies. This meant giving explicit state recognition of identities based in “origins,” rather than simply targeting such identities as problems.Footnote 42
A 1956 decree created a new legal category, citoyens Français musulmans d'Algérie (Muslim French citizens from Algeria), or FMA. The acronym FMA had existed for a decade, yet this legal category was novel because it extended state recognition to a group explicitly defined by origins: all French citizens (and legally all Algerians were French citizens) who could trace their ancestry back to someone who a) was living in what became Algeria at the time of the French conquest; and b) had been governed under Koranic law as an FMA, regardless of their own religious faith (or current civil status). State recognition of FMA status allowed the French Republic to offer support or open possibilities to FMAs. This odd intersection of religious nomenclature and an identity defined by origin, as we have seen, had long roots in the French rule of Algeria, but it took on new importance during the Algerian war. In 1959, for example, during a debate in the Senate over a proposal to establish a quota system for FMA officers in the French Armed Forces, the senator presenting the law noted that
some colleagues thought that the expression “Muslim Frenchmen” might carry a religious signification that could exclude some who were of another religion or who had no religion . . . But we have held onto it because existing texts that relate to Algeria already use the expression “Muslim Frenchmen” without any implication that the term implies any form of religious distinction.Footnote 43
Over the course of the Algerian war, documents and officials spoke endlessly of “Muslims” and the French republic pursued quota policies for “Muslims” in state hiring and the recruitment of university students. Yet these “Muslims” were supposedly defined by origin, not religion. “Muslim” equaled what most Algerian nationalists termed “Algerians”; the term stood in for what some French commentators referred to as “Arabs” and “Berbers.” This was its meaning, for example, in the debates internal to the Algerian Communist Party right before the war began in 1954, as militants grappled, according to Emmanuel Sivan, with how the party had become divided “into two racially-based camps,” Europeans and Muslims.Footnote 44
Officials and politicians began to embrace “ethnic” definitions specific to Algeria to rethink the contours of the French nation, a process they claimed would bring all Algerians more fully inside. They used ethnic categories for policies announced as targeting the effects of racism and in analyses that identified how origin-based politics functioned. French republicanism, we are told, rejects all political references to group “origins” as necessarily racist, because they depend on the lie that “races” and “ethnic groups” are more revelatory categories than that of the individual. Yet French decisions made in the name of “integrationism” remind us how such claims can obscure the multiple and paradoxical realities of republican theory and practices: republicanism, whether in the centuries following Machiavelli or in recent decades, always had been both imagined in terms of guiding principles and defined in terms of changing contexts.
After World War II and the defeat of fascism and Nazism, the new importance of antiracism was a key international context. In France, the post-Vichy hegemony of republicanism was also crucial. The ways that antirepublican arguments were excluded from the realm of the possible (because of their link to Nazi occupation and French collaboration) help explain the new willingness to think with “origins” in the post-1945 context. These contexts also render understandable the novel shape of French discussions about religion and laïcité in these years.
In their “integrationist” campaign to defeat Algerian nationalism, French officials joined their reliance on reforms linked to ethnicity and antiracism (which predominated) with others that concerned Islam-as-religion. Beyond the immediate pressures to crush the FLN, there were larger contexts at play. In 1950s France, religion increasingly appeared to be domesticated, a development that reflected a wider decline in “Western” anxieties around religious identities in the years following World War II. With an approach similar to contemporary scholars who elaborated what recent critics term the “secularization thesis,” many laïc commentators presumed that the modern French nation had found ways to master religious irrationality, to render it private and so unthreatening.Footnote 45 As historian Antoine Prost argues, these were years in which “Catholicism no longer posed a danger to the unity of the nation; a real consensus had emerged around republican principles and our [French] society was wracked more by conflicts of interest and class-based antagonisms than by these ideological debates.” Even in the one area where religion continued to provoke substantial disagreement—“the school question”—the role of Catholicism was now the source of “tensions” rather than “a war.” All participants in a 1959 forum in the left-Catholic journal Esprit on “Laïcité and Scholarly Peace” agreed on the decreasing public importance of the topic. As the Gaullist government was defending its project to extend public financing to private (overwhelmingly Catholic) schools, Henri Chateix, a retired teacher and a defender of public schools who rejected any role for the church in their operations, noted that “public opinion, again confronted with a conflict of which it has grown tired, seems to have lost some of its reflexes.”Footnote 46
This had effects on Islam, too. The so-called loss of reflexes, I suggest, helps explain why integrationist French officials proved surprisingly open to reforming policy, in the metropole and Algeria, to make it more amenable to Islam. In early 1955, for example, the Mendès-France government proposed to establish an Institut d’Études Franco-Islamiques in Paris. Bureaucratic discussions of the still-born project all expressed certainty that there was a form of Islam—“modernist”—that would find a home in the French Republic and, as it did so, would restore Islam to a truer path, make it a modern religion.Footnote 47 This Orientalist certainty—that there was a “true” Islam that could best be interpreted by French- or Western-trained theologians and guided by metropolitan governments—had a long history.Footnote 48 Yet during the Algerian war, it shaped government policies in unrecognized ways. The most notable was a French reform that extended civil marriage to “Muslims” in Algeria. Spokesmen presented this both as one part of the larger effort that began in 1957 (and became widely publicized with the 1958 advent of Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic) to expand women's rights and as one among many reforms of “Koranic civil law” that aimed to make Algerian Islam “modern” and “French.”Footnote 49
The Ordinance of 4 February 1959 codified a decision, taken in June 1958, to allow marriages between French citizens whose personal status was governed by Koranic civil law to take place at the town hall, like other French citizens, and mandated that a civil marriage—a (necessarily) nonreligious ceremony administered by a state official—take place. This broke with Algerian practices. It was one of several reforms that altered Koranic civil law rules on divorce/repudiation and the role of male legal guardians of adult women. As requested, French administrators and jurists based in Algeria sent reports to Paris about the changes. Many evoked widespread support for these reforms, anchored, on the one hand, in what was described as the indifferent or vaguely accepting reaction of “Muslim” public opinion, especially among the young, and, on the other hand, in extended analyses of why the reforms were wholly consonant with Islam, if properly understood. “Let us return to the source,” wrote the lead prosecutor attached to the appeals court of Oran, “which is to say the Koran, and examine if the rules we are changing are, according to theologians, guardians of Islam, and true believers, rooted in Divine Law . . . ” After arguing that neither the Qurʾan nor the sunna mentioned these questions, he reiterated his strong support for the reforms.Footnote 50
Another exchange between French officials brings these claims into a different light. In September 1959, a French deputy elected from the Sahara submitted his report on the “reactions of the populations of the Sahara to the application of the Ordinance of 4 February 1959” to the minister of the interior. His report outlined the insistent complaints of local, religious, and tribal leaders concerning the new rules. Like many other French officials, he recounted how he sought to use the Qurʾan and his (self-proclaimed) knowledge of “the ch'ria” to counter the critiques that local people expressed. His interlocutors claimed that their “religion,” its texts, and its laws mandated male legal guardianship of unmarried women and rejected the idea that faithful Muslim women could appear before a state official (marriages in this region were performed in the absence of the woman). He explained to these men, so he wrote, that the basis of these claims was not Islam, but rather local patriarchal traditions. His approach was typical of most such reports. What makes this document noteworthy are the written annotations of a Ministry of Interior civil servant to the deputy's arguments.Footnote 51 Rather than religious exegesis, the Paris-based functionary emphatically affirmed that the ordinance should be read as laïc: an effort “to undermine paternal authority,” “to emancipate women,” and “to affirm the French rule of the separation of Church and State,” as he wrote in the margins.Footnote 52 This approach—explicitly critical of Algerian realities, and religious arguments for them, and affirming the superiority of republican models—was also embraced by the woman who was in charge of guiding the reforms, Mlle. Nafissa Sid-Cara, named in 1958 to the Michel Debré government as Secretary of State for Muslim Social Reforms. Yet despite her success in advancing a series of reforms that aimed to emancipate women—a hard-fought battle involving her repeated threats to resign—the laws and rules adopted were all, publicly but also juridically, framed as consonant with Islam, that is, with a modern Islam, accurately understood, and against local traditions that, because of their “fossilization,” had become non-Islamic.Footnote 53
ALGERIA'S “FRENCH” JEWS: THE DEFEAT OF ZIONISM, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF INTEGRATIONISM
The ways that the same officials discussed Algeria's Jews sharpen the contours and meanings of this development. There are signs that the republic's relationship with Judaism, as with other religions, had become more flexible during the war. In the fall of 1958, for example, Algiers instructed prefectures across Algeria that Jewish civil servants who requested days off to celebrate the High Holy days should be accommodated, a clear break with previous laïc practices.Footnote 54 Yet the integrationist reliance on taking “origins” into account in pursuit of “republican” policy was more visible, notably in official plans for how to deal with Algeria's Jews in light of imminent independence. Claims that Algeria's Jews had an “ethnic” specificity, which paralleled that of “Kabyles,” “Chaouis,” and “Arabs,” anchored internal debates and projects in 1960 and 1961. Yet the developments that actually led to independence saw these references expunged from official considerations, to be replaced by religious descriptions.Footnote 55
In the spring of 1961, the leaders of Jewish organizations in Algeria were shocked to learn that the president of the republic Charles de Gaulle had evoked, in private conversations, “the rights of the Arab, Chaouia, Mozabite, Jewish, and French communities.”Footnote 56 The listing of group names reflected what critics termed a “‘communities’ policy,” which sought to set the stage for an Algerian state that, when independent, would recognize group rights (notably for the “Europeans,” or pieds noirs, here termed “French”). Jewish leaders fixated on how the statement distinguished between the “Jews” and the “French” in Algeria. To counter what they saw as its disastrous implications, Jewish leaders on both sides of the Mediterranean immediately and publicly affirmed that Jews in Algeria had no political identity as Jews. Their arguments avoided all references to either religion or ethnicity; they turned to French history to assert that they were merely French citizens. Like all “French people,” argued one of the preeminent French Jewish organizations, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, they should be considered as “individuals,” and not as “belonging to an ‘ethnic community.’” Jewish leaders now called on the state to clarify whether membership in the French nation was to be decided on the basis of “subnational” group identities. In Algeria as in France, what made each individual “Jew” French, community leaders pointed out, was being born of parents with French citizenship and/or on French soil.Footnote 57
The FLN's 1956 Congress of the Soummam insisted that “Jewish Algerians” were fully part of the Algerian nation. Jewish leaders and their allies successfully sought to ensure the government adopted a position that wholly rejected this claim about a group of “Algerians,” even if the republic accepted the origin-based claims of Algerian nationalists regarding “Muslims.” They had great success in their efforts to keep any reference to any form of Jewish identity out of documents and deliberations. After repeated interventions by powerful allies, “Israelites” disappeared from French proposals, except in occasional affirmations that they were part of the group to be included in the “European minority.”Footnote 58
What is remarkable about this effort to present a “European character” to French nationality—which included Jews—while affirming its “republican” genealogy was the formative role of Zionism. In the last months of the government's brutal fight to crush Algerian nationalism, officials of the ministries of the interior and foreign affairs engaged in a tug-of-war with Israel over Algerian Jews. Their eventual success helped buttress the claim that Algerian Jews were first and foremost French citizens, for whom religion was a private affair, not the basis of community identity.
This history of thinking about the contradictions between French republicanism and Zionism informed official French analyses and the claims of Algerian Jews at the end of the Algerian war. In these final years of French Algeria, the future of Jews qua Jews became a topic of official concern. The proximate cause was the growing number of Jewish departures from Algeria. (Unsurprisingly, bureaucrats spoke of an “exodus.”) As early as 1960, police and army intelligence noticed that a good number of Jews were leaving with no intention of returning.Footnote 59 Concerted official attention to such activity began in early 1961, and bureaucrats made considerable effort to see that the “approximately” 128,380 Algerian Jews that one list claimed were living in Algeria at the beginning of 1961 remained there.Footnote 60
Officials blamed what was happening among this group of French citizens on foreign intervention; this, of course, was similar to earlier French claims about Algerian nationalists as pawns of international conspiracies. Yet in this instance, French sources stated clearly that there was one culprit, Zionism, and they linked it to one state, Israel. French functionaries had verifiable intelligence that the Israeli paragovernmental organization, the Jewish Agency, was inciting French Jews in Algeria to leave for Israel, to “make ʿaliya” in Zionist parlance. In January 1961, the highest civilian official in Algeria, Delegate General Jean Morin, alerted the Ministry of the Interior to requests for entry permits by “ten delegates of the Jewish Agency,” who wanted, they stated, “to calm the apprehensions of the Israelite population of Algeria.” Morin argued that they had a different agenda, noting that the “most important activity of the Jewish Agency always has been to encourage emigration to Israel.” He asked whether the French government “would facilitate such an enterprise” and stressed “above all” that emigration to a foreign country was being urged on “a population that was the first autochthonous population to acquire French nationality.”Footnote 61 In mid-March, Morin reported that Jewish Agency representatives had shifted from “facilitating the emigration of Israelites who wanted to leave” to “exhortations to leave for Israel.”Footnote 62 Morin again touched on the issue of Algerian Jews’ unique history of successful assimilation. Jewish Agency speakers claimed, Morin reported, that “Algerian independence is inevitable in the short term” and that Israel “merited their trust more than France.”Footnote 63
The contest between Zionism and the French Republic over Algeria's Jews, as Morin made clear, was the heart of the matter. French officials aimed to win it. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, stated in 1958 that the French should trust no Algerian Arabs “no matter how assimilated.” Officials repeatedly invoked Ben-Gurion's remark. His assertion of inassimilable difference—and necessary enmity—was indicative of the ethnoreligious crux of the Zionist project advanced by the Jewish Agency. In 1960, it was the subject of a polite but firm disagreement between Ben-Gurion and de Gaulle, when the former offered his advice to the latter: like the Jews in his country, Israel's prime minister argued, the French in Algeria needed “to build the country themselves,” through the exclusion of Arab Muslim labor: “instead of 500,000 soldiers, you must send 500,000 workers . . . to make the Sahara French just like Israel made the Negev [Jewish; sic].” It was an ethnoreligious definition of national identity that French republican ideologues found anathema. De Gaulle, after thanking Ben-Gurion, remarked that if France did as he suggested, “it would provoke the same fury among Arabs as Israel had [provoked].”Footnote 64
Official efforts to prevent Jewish departures at first seemed futile. Yet by the end of 1961 and, more markedly, the beginning of 1962, in what proved the last months of French Algeria, military and civilian officials noted a decline in Jewish departures. More important, when Algeria's Jews did leave Algeria en masse, almost all (over 90%) “repatriated” to France, despite Zionist efforts. Since Israel's 1948 founding this remains the only example of the flight of a substantial group of Jews in which most did not go to what Zionists proclaimed was the homeland of all Jews. Algerian Jews’ choice of France “was interpreted by some in Israel as showing the limits of Zionist ideology.” In August 1962, a mock trial in Tel Aviv condemned Algeria's Jews for the betrayal of the Jewish homeland.Footnote 65
The intensity of French officials’ efforts to counter Zionist claims was clearly linked to the political and diplomatic successes of Algerian nationalism. Yet even the ways they parried Zionism reflected their unwillingness to take seriously the claims of Algerian nationalism: in the process of denying that “Muslims” were French—despite legal realities and the intensity of political arguments and actions to the contrary during the war—they could reaffirm republican orthodoxy as regards non-“Muslim” French citizens, notably Algerian Jews. Assimilation worked, but not for “Muslims.” This allowed the integrationist experiments—like Algeria's “Muslims” tout court—to be excised from French history.
CONCLUSION
In assessing current debates over the public visibility of Islam in light of the French past, scholars have privileged either a domestic history of struggle over the place of religion in public life or an imperial history of Orientalism and racism. Both approaches rely on overarching narratives that crystallized in the 19th century. To emphasize continuities, they depend on teleologies, which begin either with the declaration of the first French Republic in 1792, followed by the re-emergence of republican rule in France after 1870, or with the renewed French pursuit of overseas empire, which began (under royal control) with the 1830 invasion of Algiers and mushroomed under republican leadership by the century's end. More recent histories, notably of the 1950s and 1960s, suggest a different frame: in this mid-20th-century historical narrative, choices and actors from outside Europe determined French decisions.Footnote 66
Ethnicity and religion were both claims of belonging and bases for public action that republicans had long rejected. Yet in the post-1945 era, French officials showed new willingness to make use of both. They faced the challenge of the Algerian Revolution in a domestic context where the republic seemed newly hegemonic, untroubled by antirepublican internal threats—notably from Catholicism—and in an international context in which political as well as social-scientific discussions, after the defeat of fascism and Nazism, gave new authority to antiracist arguments.Footnote 67 Over the course of the Algerian Revolution, French authorities proposed innovative legal and policy shifts to bring Islam more fully into a “republican” frame while admitting that “ethnic” or “origin-based” groups existed in Algeria. The former trend aimed to “normalize” Islam and did so in part through increasing references to “Koranic law” and “Muslims” in the public sphere. The latter extended “exceptional” measures of recognition that aimed to redress the effects of racist discrimination that these groups had suffered at the hands of other French citizens and the republic. This approach promised to tame the danger of origin-based politics and set the stage for a renewed republicanism. With French defeat, all of these efforts were abandoned.
The FLN's triumph forced France to accept that its claims on “Muslims” were untenable. Zionism, however, had lost what numerous Israeli and French observers saw as a contest over the national belonging of Algeria's Jews. The failure of Zionist efforts to convince Algeria's Jews to come to Israel legitimated what bureaucratic explanations at the war's end had suggested: that one of the potentially disruptive “sub-national groupings” was origin-based (a “nationality”) and proved politically threatening, and that the other was only religious and thus not possessed of a politically meaningful identity. In 1962, policies toward Algeria's Jews at once reaffirmed republicanism's post-1945 confidence vis-à-vis religion—which included Christianity and Judaism, but not Islam—and erased the French Republic's brief forays into grappling with “ethnicity.”Footnote 68 This frame—that Jews have religion whereas Muslims are part of a “nationality”—I suggest, makes visible a newly intense French concern with “ethnic” difference as a potential threat to republican values. The name the French gave to the “ethnic group” that then posed the most concern (because alien to France, despite their French nationality) was “Muslims.”
