The question of ‘secularity’ (laïcité) has risen sharply up the French political agenda over the last twenty-five years. Ways in which it is defined and applied are hotly contested and lie at the nerve centre of wide debates about the nature of the Republic, French national identity and indeed of France's colonial past. According to an IFOP opinion poll in November 2015, 87 per cent of French people agreed that was important to respect laïcité at school, 84 per cent of respondents said that it was part of France's identity while 81 per cent thought that it was under threat in France. That said, they did not agree on what laïcité meant. For 32 per cent it meant separating religion from politics, for 27 per cent it meant ensuring liberty of conscience, while 17 per cent said it meant reducing the influence of religion in society.Footnote ¹ Historians, sociologists and political scientists as well as journalists and activists join battle on the question, and a selection of their recent contributions, from different angles and with different methodologies, are reviewed here.

A commission appointed by President Jacques Chirac reported in 2003 that laïcité was ‘the cornerstone of the republican pact’, at the heart of what the Republic was about. The republican project fought battles for over a century to free itself from the political influence of the Catholic Church that supported the monarchy and the Empire in order to establish itself as a durable regime. In 1789 Protestants and Jews were emancipated and the Catholic Church was invited to place itself under the law of the land. When it refused to do so and opposed the revolution it was persecuted, leading to the dechristianisation campaign of 1793. Consequently it supported the monarchy or the Empire, whose Concordat of 1801 introduced state funding of the secular clergy, and it did everything it could to prevent the return of revolution and republic.

Under the Third Republic in 1881–2 education minister Jules Ferry introduced free, compulsory and lay education in state-funded schools. Religious education would not be taught in school, but one day per week children were allowed out of school for religious instruction in their own faith. After 1886 the religious congregations which had taught in many state schools were no longer permitted to do so and fell back on private schools.Footnote ² The principle of laïcité required children to leave their religious identities at the door of the public school (école républicaine) in order to learn to become citizens who would put their own beliefs and interests behind them in pursuit of the common good of the republic. Further attacks by the Church on the republic at the time of the Dreyfus Affair led to the expulsion of religious congregations from private schools also in 1902 and to the 1905 Separation of Church and state that ended the Concordat.

The question of laïcité is also central to the definition of the French nation. France has often been held up as a model of the ‘civic nation’ as opposed to the ‘ethnic’ nation epitomised by Germany. The model goes back to the 1789 definition of the Abbé Sieyès that the nation is ‘a body of associates living under common laws and represented by the same legislative assembly’.Footnote ³ The privileges of orders, provinces and corporations were duly abolished and individuals were invited to become equal citizens of a single nation. There was, however, a competing definition of the nation, formulated by Ernest Renan in 1882. This saw the nation as the creation of history, ‘to have common glories in the past, a common will in the present. . . . A nation is a grand solidarity constituted by the sentiment of sacrifices which one has made and those that one is disposed to make again . . . The existence of a nation (pardon this metaphor!) is an everyday plebiscite.’Footnote ⁴ Under the French Revolution and Napoleon, France projected itself onto the European and world stage, first as the Grande Nation, then as the Grand Empire.

In the nineteenth century France became a major colonial power. As president of the council in 1880–1 and 1883–5 Jules Ferry extended France's empire from Algeria and Cochin-China, later South Vietnam, to the protectorate of Tunisia and to Tonkin, later North Vietnam. Settlers from France, together with naturalised Spaniards and Italians, were citizens, but under the Code de l'Indigénat, codified in Algeria in 1881 and later extended to other French colonies, the indigenous Muslim peoples were not citizens but subjects, governed by their own customs and religious laws. When France lost its long and bloody war to hold on to Algeria (1954–62), the settlers and those Algerians who had fought with them were obliged to leave, joining Algerian migrants who had already moved to France to work. France rapidly became a multicultural society. This change provoked increasing concern in some quarters and indeed nostalgia for the colonial period. On 23 February 2005 a law was passed which might have been drafted by Renan himself. It proclaimed that

Article 4 of this law required teaching in schools to recognise ‘the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa’. Following widespread protest this article (but not the rest of the law) was repealed in January 2006.

The last few years has seen a spate of publications on laïcité, both by French and non-French scholars, by academics, educationists and activists. They address, with different emphases, key questions about the republic, French national identity and the colonial past. Of the eleven works reviewed here, three are by UK scholars working on contemporary France, two are by French historians and sociologists of religion, two are by French educationists and four are by French researchers or activists of North African origin who identify very differently in political terms.

Emile Chabal's Divided Republic is a masterly account of the shape of politics in contemporary France. It offers and sharp and powerful analysis of concept and practice of neo-republicanism, that rebranding of republicanism after 1989 which placed laïcité and the école républicaine at its heart. Chabal rehabilitates the Third Republic, which had invented laïcité but had long suffered reputational damage as corrupt, unstable and ineffective, and was swept away in 1940. This is very much an intellectual history, examining and contextualising the publications of key actors in these debates. The process began, argues Chabal, with Pierre Nora's multivolume Les Lieux de Mémoire.Footnote ⁶ Celebrating the buildings, statues, anniversaries and texts that shaped the French Republic and Nation, mainly during the Third Republic, it was criticised by Perry Anderson as ‘one of the most patently ideological programmes in post-war historiography, anywhere in the world’ (20). Neo-republicanism was crystallised in 1989 by the affaire du foulard, when three young Muslim women were excluded from a state school in the Paris suburbs for refusing to remove the hijab in class. Three key events for Chabal now identified the Republic with laïcité. First came the ‘Profs, ne capitulons pas’ letter of 2 November 1989 in the Nouvel Observateur, warning that to surrender a firm line on laïcité would be a new Munich. It was signed by Régis Debray, who had campaigned during the Bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1988–9 for a return to revolutionary values, Elisabeth Badinter, the biographer of Condorcet, and Alain Finkielkraut, a former Maoist of Jewish origin who became a leading campaigner for the obligation of all citizens to commit to the republic and civic nation. Second, a Supreme Council for Integration (Haut Conseil à l'Intégration), set up in 1990, sent out the message that it was the task of the école républicaine to integrate minority religious and ethnic groups as French citizens. Only this could prevent the development of a multicultural society that would amount to its disaggregation. Third, the commission set up by President Chirac under Bernard Stasi, a graduate of the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), of mixed French, Italian, Spanish and Cuban heritage, which reported in 2003 had a fairly open-minded view of laïcité. It took the view that the state, neutral in religious matters, should recognise Jewish and Muslim as well as Catholic holidays, but it also ruled that what it called ‘conspicuous’ religious symbols and dress, such as the Islamic veil and kippa, should be banned from state schools. In the event, only this recommendation was taken up by the Chirac government, becoming the law of 15 March 2004. ‘From a neo-republican perspective’, Chabal rightly says, ‘there was no need to modify France's model of integration: the processes of integration that had united rural populations, the working classes and early immigrants in the nineteenth century could once again be used to absorb incoming immigrants at the end of the twentieth’ (104).

Chabal's account of neo-republicanism is very much centred on the metropolis and is a little impatient with post-colonial approaches. It might have been interesting to follow Perry Anderson's further criticism of Pierre Nora's project that there was no mention of France's 1954 defeat in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu, and Nora's reply, ‘Mourning! Colonial mourning! That would be a real lieu de mémoire to deal with’.Footnote ⁷ Chabal takes issue with Joan Scott who, in her 2007 Politics of the Veil, argued that the meaning of the law of 15 March 2004 was laid bare by that of 23 February 2005 and ‘the desire to eliminate rather than address the growing challenge of French republicanism posed by the aftermath of its colonial history’. She contended that ‘the legacy of discrimination against, and denigration of, North Africans, continues to trouble the nation in ways that seem endless and insoluble’.Footnote ⁸ By contrast, Chabal argues laïcité should not be seen ‘simply as a thinly-veiled form of neo-colonial domination targeted at Muslims’. Rather, he says, ‘we should see laïcité first and foremost as a strong, teleological reading of French history’ (31). Chabal cites article 4 of the law of 2005 and explains how it provoked, among many reactions, the formation of the Natives of the Republic (Les Indigènes de la République), who argued that immigrants of Muslim background were being treated as ‘natives’ in the metropolis. But he also cites a Figaro poll of December 2005 which found that 64 per cent of the French approved of article 4 and reminds us of the kick back against post-colonial interpretations in works such as Pascal Bruckner's Tyranny of Guilt.Footnote ⁹ In the end Chabal has little patience with the post-colonial critique.

Secular Institutions, Islam and Education Policy, the outcome of a collaboration at St Antony's College Oxford by Paola Mattei, Associate Professor in Comparative Social Policy, who works on France, and Fulbright Fellow Andrew Aguilhar, who writes on the United States, is an excellent work of political and educational sociology with a strong historical understanding. Mattei begins her study with the law of 2004 banning conspicuous symbols and dress which, she says, was a classic form of laïcité ‘aimed to protect not only the state but also individuals (schoolchildren) from what the state deemed to be religious pressures in certain schools’ (2). She too takes issue with Joan Scott's account of the law as ‘discriminatory’ and argues that ‘laïcité as a legal and philosophical principle is not at all inconsistent with religious pluralism, freedom of expression and a liberal conception of the liberty of the state’ (3). However, she concedes, while one version of laïcité separates Church and state and treats all religions as equal, another version is instrumentalised by what she calls laïcité d’État ‘for the purposes of nation-building, reinforcing a particular political project and assimilating ethnic differences’ (5). While the first form of laïcité is tolerant of religious practices outside the state, she argues that ‘combative and militant secularism is incompatible with Islam, and for such matters (sic) with any religion’ (xi).

Significantly, Mattei rises above the binary of a stand-off between the republic and Islam by exploring how attempts were made after 1993 to bring Islam within the republic through representative bodies such as the Consultative (later Representative) Council of French Muslims (Conseil Representatif des Musulmans de France; CRMF). Three issues, however, undermined the possibility of the integration of Islam. First the CRMF under Algerian-born Dalil Boubakeur did not unite all Muslims in France but was contested by other bodies with Moroccan or Tunisian links. Second, much of the Muslim community experienced an effective segregation in French society, confined to the ghetto-like banlieues. Its youth in particular suffered disproportionately from poverty, school underperformance and unemployment. Third, as Mattei points out, 82 per cent of the 5–6 million Muslims in France were of North African origin, were stigmatised as ‘foreign’ even if they were second- or third-generation immigrants who had been born in France. Their sense of exclusion from French society led to a process of ‘re-Islamisation’ as they adopted a second identity as members of the global Islamic community.

On the positive side, Mattei argues that the 2004 law did have some positive effect. The Cherifi report of 2005 found that fewer students were wearing ‘conspicuous’ religious symbols and dress at school and that the number of legal actions against those who did were falling. On the negative side, she concedes that Muslim students were increasingly leaving the state school system, where these rules applied, opting instead for private schools or distance learning. Curiously, she does not mention another angry response of young Muslims to their sense of exclusion, the riots in the banlieues of October–November 2005.Footnote ¹⁰ Very interesting, however, is her account of how government policy almost changed to a more open version of laïcité. On 11 November 2013 the website of prime minister Jean-Marie Ayrault floated ideas about how to make French education policy more multiculturalist by suggesting, for example, that the contribution of immigrants to French history could be given space on the syllabus. Reactions were quick to come, with Marine Le Pen calling it ‘a declaration of war against the French’. President Hollande distanced himself from Ayrault and the website was taken down (7), but the question of how much room for manoeuvre there is on laïcité within the neo-republican project is a subject that requires further exploration.

The question of different forms of laïcité is very much the field of French historians and sociologists of religion. From their observatory at the l’École pratique des hautes études in Paris they contend that there is no one simple model of laïcité and that its history is not linear but complex and rather untidy. In his L’État et les religions en France Philippe Portier argues that there have indeed been two basic understandings of laïcité. One, which he calls exclusivist, associated with Régis Debray and Alain Finkielkraut, insists on a rigid division between the public sphere in which citizens are abstract individuals and the private sphere inhabited by religion.Footnote ¹¹ It is hostile to diversity on the grounds that it endangers the unity of the republic and is particularly hostile to Islam, holding for example that wearing the veil oppresses Muslim women. This question has long divided French feminists, some of whom argue that women may have their own reasons of faith or identity to wear the veil. The other version, which Portier calls inclusivist, is associated with Alain Touraine and Michel Wieviorka.Footnote ¹² It is more tolerant of religion in the public sphere, more open to multiculturalism and argues that all religions, including Islam, should be treated equally.

Historically, Portier traces a shift towards exclusivist laïcité since 1989 and argues that a later attempt to shift the ground back to inclusion foundered on ‘the fear engendered by the rise of radical Islamism on the international scene and the violence it has exported onto French territory’ (261). As a historian, Portier is keen to point out that the 1905 Separation of Church and state, so often declared the touchstone of laïcité, actually saw off much more intolerant attempts to deal with the Church. One, led by Maurice Alland, socialist deputy of the Var, who saw religion as a social scourge like alcoholism, wanted separation to complete the revolution's work of dechristianisation. A second, headed by Émile Combes, the radical prime minister in 1902–4 who expelled teaching congregations even from private schools, wanted to use separation to bring the Church under even tighter state control. Portier underlines that the law promulgated on 6 December 1905 was actually much more liberal than these two versions. Its article 1 guaranteed both liberty of conscience and the free exercise of religion while article 2, while ending state subsidies to the Church, still funded prison chaplaincies, paid pensions to former clergy and made provision for the management of church property.

This argument is taken up by Jean Baubérot, emeritus professor at the École pratique des hautes études and the leading historian of laïcité.Footnote ¹³ He sat on the Stasi commission and abstained on the proposal that conspicuous religious symbols and dress should be banned from state schools. In his 7 Laïcités françaises he outlines a spectrum of Weberian ideal-types of laïcité. Four were defined by the debates over the 1905. Two, which he said were defeated in 1905, but are more influential in France today, were what he calls the antireligious option of Alland and the Gallican option of Combes that wished to increase state control of the Church. Two, which were victorious in 1905 but have now been largely eclipsed, were the options that separated Church and state but allowed religion to flourish either in the life of the individual or collectively, accepting the principle of diversity in French society.

Two further versions of laïcité, argues Baubérot, were formulated later. What he calls ‘open laïcité’ corresponds to Poirier's inclusive laïcité, and allows for the free exercise of all religions, including Islam. ‘Identity laïcité’, by contrast, echoing Portier's exclusivist model, rejected the Stasi commission's recommendation that Jewish and Muslim religious festivals should be recognised alongside Catholic ones but proposed the banning of religious signs in state schools, in particular the hijab. Whereas laïcité had been developed on the political left, argues Baubérot, ‘identity laïcité’ was developed by the political right. This version was authoritarian and intolerant, and aimed to define France as a homogenous culture against foreign threats. Paradoxically, it has become compatible with the idea of France as a Catholic country hostile to Islam, which it saw as the religion of immigrants, and has spawned a Catholic and national laïcité.

Laïcité is fought over not only in theory by historians but in practice by educationists. Debate has raged among the latter as to whether it promotes equality and integration, or perversely increases inequality and discrimination. In their provocatively entitled study, Fatima moins bien noté que Marianne, historian François Durpaire and sociologist Béatrice Mabilon-Bonfils, both academics at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, argue controversially whereas the first battle of laïcité was to free the state from the grip of the Catholic religion and establish its neutrality, today ‘laïcité is not neutral but is a veritable political project of aggression’ (31). Rather than increase the chances of integration for students of immigrant and above all Muslim origin, they claim, the école républicaine actually manufactures social and ethnic exclusion. The collection of statistics on ethnicity and religion is formally banned in France, allegedly because it might invite discrimination, but this, they argue, does not prevent discrimination. Deducing religious origin from first names they demonstrate segregation by a case study in the Vaucluse where one nursery school had 14 per cent of Muslims but another 89 per cent. They show that Muslim students of North African origin suffer discrimination. These are overrepresented in technical classes leading to less prestigious careers, are systematically given worse marks than students of French origin and are more liable to be punished. Islam, they argue, is presented in school textbooks as foreign and different, unable to adapt to the modern world and fundamentally and violently hostile to Western civilisation. A survey of secondary school teachers in 2015 found that while 53 per cent thought that Christianity was incompatible with the Republic and 60 per cent thought this for Judaism, the score rose to 73 per cent in the case of Islam. They found evidence of a ‘moral panic’ in society about the threat of Islam which resulted in clinging to a hard version of laïcité as a defence against it. This was explicit in the twenty-eight-page booklet on laïcité issued to all schools in October 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, with a fifteen point ‘Charter of Laïcité’ and the announcement that ‘the Nation entrusts the School with the mission to teach pupils the values of the Republic’ (17–8).

Durpaire and Beatrice Mabilon-Bonfils are not happy with the ‘conquering’ form of laïcité and made a plea to develop ‘benevolent laïcité’. This should be done, they say, by ceasing simply to lecture students on the values of the republic and instead interactively stimulating class discussion on the subject. Schools should become more diverse, less segregated and more open: parents should be allowed into the school for events and teachers should be trained less in an abstract way and acquire a deeper understanding of contemporary society. History should be taught differently, less about ‘our ancestors the Gauls (nos ancêtres les Gaulois) and more in a global way, in particular on the shared history of France and North Africa.

One exceptional contribution to this debate comes from Véronique Decker, a headteacher at Bobigny in the deprived Seine Saint-Denis banlieue north of Paris for thirteen years. In her packed and punchy L’École du peuple she presents her school as ‘an ethnic ghetto where dozens of poor families of diverse origins but also recent immigrants have been gathered. A large number of them are believers and among these a majority are Muslims’ (114). She details the daily battles to teach children whose parents are in overcrowded accommodation and low-paid work, often cheated and exploited by their employers. After the Bataclan attacks on 13 November 2015 she reached for the concept of laïcité in a positive way. In a communiqué she drafted for the school she wrote, ‘the murderers want above all to make us hate each other, fight with each other, separate us by origins, religions and cultures. But laïcité allows us to remain united, to share the same schools, live in the same neighbourhoods, play sport together, to get to know and like each other’ (81). She argues however that the practice of laïcité is not enough to overcome social inequalities and discrimination embedded in wider society. Immigrants who were excluded as Arabs – ‘who were foreign, and we were their colonisers’ – are now excluded as Muslims, since, she regrets, ‘we had to find something to point the finger at’(113–4). This reinvention of colonial hierarchies was reinforced by the ghettoisation of the rich in their neighbourhoods and the poor on their estates. The utopian solution to this problem for Decker would be to build social housing in rich neighbourhoods, to organise summer camps (colonies de vacances), school exchanges and school projects between different kinds of school, so that ‘children had a vision of the diversity of real life and adults decided to build a more equal world’ (116).

What emerges from these studies of segregation and inequality in the school system is the enduring legacy of the colonial France, the division between former colonisers and former colonised that has not been eliminated in the so-called universal and indivisible republic. This suggests that the most fruitful approach may be to analyse metropole and colony in the same frame.Footnote ¹⁴ The challenge has been taken up by historians such as Joan Scott, Patricia Lorcin, Todd Shepard, Kate Marsh and Tyler Stovall.Footnote ¹⁵ In France this task was pioneered by a research group called ACHAC (Colonisation, Immigration, Postcolonialisme), working outside the mainstream French academy, who in 2005 proposed the term ‘colonial fracture’ to explain the division in France between ‘native’ French and immigrants of colonial descent.Footnote ¹⁶ This agenda has been taken up by other historians and social scientists who often for personal reasons are particularly sensitive to the enduring legacy of colonialism.

Benjamin Stora is a French historian of Algerian Jewish origin, who left Algeria aged eleven in 1962 along with a million other pied-noir settlers, 1.2 million soldiers and 100,000 Algerian auxiliaries or harkis, joining 400,000 Algerian immigrants already in France. His publications on Algeria, the Algerian War and its memory are legion.Footnote ¹⁷ After the events of January 2015 he published Les Mémoires dangereuses as a revised edition of his 1999 Le Transfert d'une mémoire. This explores the ‘transfer’ of the memory of the pieds noirs from one side of the Mediterranean to the other. He highlights what he calls the ‘Sudist’ imagination of the pieds noirs, very like the memory of the confederation cultivated by the ‘poor whites’ in the United States, with its myths, its heroes and its own ‘French War of Secession’, that is, the Algerian War’ (83). This memory was taken up and developed politically, says Stora, by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had served as paratrooper during the Algerian War, by the OAS who battled to keep Algeria French and by the pieds noirs, often joining forces in the extreme right Front National. Their memory conflicted with rival memories of Algerian immigrants in France, which focused on massacres they had endured at the hands of the French, from the massacre of Sétif on VE Day, 8 May 1945, to the military repression of the ‘battle of Algiers’ in 1957 and to the massacre of Algerian demonstrators by the French police on 17 October 1961.

The updated edition work has sections on the ‘choc de janvier’ and conversations with Alexis Jenni, author of L'Art français de la guerre. Forcefully, he argues that the terrorist attacks in France were a reprise of the never-ending Algerian War between the ‘Sudists’ seeking a homogenous France and the marginalised Algerian immigrant population.

Claire Eldridge's From Empire to Exile covers much of the same ground, but in a fine-grained way that is more interested than Stora in the people who carried these divided memories, the pieds noirs and the harkis. The pieds noirs, she argues, constructed a fantasy about the harmony that had existed between European settlers, Jews and Arabs in pre-1962 and a tragedy of victims they became when France abandoned them. She has a wonderful vignette about the village built by pieds noirs in the 1960s in the Provençal village of Carnoux, where they lived a life of unadulterated nostalgia. Even more tragic were the harkis – the Algerians who had fought in the French army and had to flee for their lives in 1962 – who spent long years vegetating in internment camps in the South of France before being put to work in forestry and then moved to the banlieues of the big cities. In the second half of the book she examines the ‘“Return” of the War of Independence’ in terms of memory wars from the 1990s. This was stimulated by the global rise of Islam and by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as civil war in Algeria, reviving debates about the use of torture in Algeria and the pain of losing an empire pitted against the bloodletting it involved. Eldridge demonstrates how through associations, the press, autobiography and protest, these two constituencies put their message across. There are only two caveats about this book. Eldridge does not deal with the memory of those who supported Algerian nationalism, especially the FLN, and does not therefore deal with organisations such as the Indigènes de la République. And her narrative ends in 2012, before the terrorist attacks three years later.

The Indigènes de la République were formed in reaction to the laws of 15 March 2004 banning the veil from state schools and of 23 February 2015, honouring those who had been involved in France's colonial project in North Africa. Its voice was that of Houria Bouteldja, born in Algeria in 1973 but studying in Lyon, who turned the story of colonial oppression on its head by making the anniversary of the massacre of Sétif on 8 May 1945 the founding moment of Les Indigènes on 8 May 2005. Ten years later in 2015 Bouteldja gave a significant interview to the review Vacarmes. She described the 2005 manifesto of the Indigènes as a complete break with contemporary politics, making no reference ‘either to Marx, or to the Enlightenment or to the values of the Republic. We wanted to develop a political thought starting with ourselves, anchored in to struggles of immigration and anti-colonialism.’ The aim, she underlined, was ‘to reframe the political debate in terms of the question of race and anti-imperialism’.

This was a direct challenge to conventional ideas of the Republic and nation, using the weapon of anti-colonialism. Although, said Bouteldja, many of the Indigènes were formally French citizens, because of discrimination in matters of ghettoisation, unemployment, police brutality and the control of their bodies, they felt like ‘colonial subjects’ or ‘sub-citizens in the imperialistic French state’. Not only did they part company with the universal republic, they realised that ‘the legitimate body of the nation was the white Christian’ and that ‘France, which is colonial, decides whom to make inferior’. The refusal to allow minorities to form communities within the nation resulted in their exclusion. Laïcité could help, argued Bouteldja, in so far as ‘it permits the co-existence of different beliefs’. She added that there was ‘a principle higher than laïcité, that of justice and dignity’. The ultimate aim of Les Indigènes was to decolonise France, allowing the ‘equality of all communities within the Republic’.

The Indigènes formed their own party in 2010 but did not do well electorally, even in areas such as Saint-Denis. Their approach was contested by others of North African and Muslim origin who argued that to return to the politics of race and religion divided the left and gave comfort to the right. Nedjib Sidi Moussa, born in the declining industrial town of Valenciennes (Nord) in 1982 to a family of Algerian origin, identifies as working class and revolutionary rather than Muslim. Immigrants of North African origin in France, he argues in La Fabrique du Musulman, whether they are Salafists or atheists, shopkeepers or proletarians, Moroccans or Ch'tis, have been constructed en bloc as Muslims in order to ‘distance them or take aim at them’ as ‘the scapegoats of French society’ (3). The defence of laïcité has become a weapon of Islamophobia and has been taken up by ‘those nostalgic for France as la fille aînée de l’Église’, who had until now fought against it. Meanwhile conservative Muslims defending liberal economic ideas and the traditional family against gay marriage have been recruited by reactionary movements such as Fils de France and France fière. Moussa accuses Boutelja of both playing into the hands of the right and of dividing the left by a ‘racialisation of the social question’ (20). Moussa appears like a latter-day Jules Guesde, criticising socialists for becoming caught up in the Dreyfus Affair and anticlericalism rather than pressing for social revolution. Instead of retreating to the ghetto, he argues that Muslim youth and workers need to reinvent ‘revolutionary theory’ and seek inspiration from previous revolutions from Mexico in 1910, Kronstadt in 1921 and Barcelona in 1936 to Soweto in 1976 and Algeria in 1988.

A final contribution to the question of laïcité, immigration and Islam is La République identitaire by Béligh Nabli, a researcher at the Institut des Relations Internationales et Stratégiques (IRIS). His frame of analysis is broader than that of Boutelja and Moussa and his solution more moderate. In the face of the challenges of globalisation, European integration and increased migration, especially from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, he argues, both the republic and the nation in France have experienced ‘retreat to identity’. The republic has reinforced the doctrine of unity and indivisibility proclaimed by the Convention on 25 September 1792 by raising laïcité to the status of a ‘civil religion’ and insisting on a ‘hard’ version of laïcité not required by the law of 1905. This laïcité attacks ‘Anglo-Saxon’ multiculturalism and denounces communautarisme as a threat to its unity. At the same time, says Nabli, the French nation has been redefined as the community of the majority, ‘native, Catholic and white’, and therefore excluding immigrants, Muslims and non-whites (91). The nation has been hijacked by the extreme right Front National, and republic and nation have been elided in a republican nationalism. Meanwhile, as Baubérot too observes, a ‘new laïcité’ or a ‘Christian conception of laïcité’ has added Catholicism as one of its ingredients and been appropriated by a right which had fought laïcité for over a hundred years.

The republic is not only national but colonial, continues Nabli. ‘The colonial Republic is dead, but the colonial unconscious (refoulé) is still with us’ (34). He cites the first convention of the Republican Party in June 2015, which required all French citizens to ‘adopt our French lifestyle, accept republican and French rules and embrace French language and culture’ (126). This requirement of assimilation, he argues, links the republic of identity to the colonial republic. Both are based on the effective exclusion of Muslims and non-whites. The solution proposed by Nabli is that the republic has to be rethought. It is not a one-dimensional entity that has been frozen in the French Revolution or the colonial period. It is polysemic and dynamic and has repeatedly reinvented itself. Why not then move on to another incarnation, a republic that is progressive and inclusive of minorities who are also part of the nation?

These works all address very pressing issues in contemporary France. Whether the republic depends for its survival on a laïcité that is open or closed, tolerant or exclusive, neutral or identitaire. Whether the French nation is owned by a particular majority, the so-called Français de souche, dubbed the ‘sous-chiens’ by Bouteldja, or whether it genuinely includes French people of all faiths and ethnicities who share in a common project. The role of the école républicaine is crucial here: can it become a vehicle of engagement between different communities, promoting the ideal and practice of ‘vivre ensemble’? The ability to live together depends also on France coming to terms with its colonial past instead or reproducing colonial ambitions abroad and colonial hierarchies at home. Much depends here on how French history is presented. Benjamin Stora and Alexis Jenni have written on the need to ‘enlarge the history of France’ to include that of excluded and stigmatised minorities. Stora told the Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration in 2014 that the history of France cannot simply be written as a metropolitan history ‘with a vision of immigration that is always placed outside, in the banlieues of history, outside national, whereas it is in fact a constitutive part of the nation, of French history’ (23, n.1). French history can no longer be simply that of the ‘Grande Nation, the unforgettable memory of grandeur, the historic past France that lit up the world with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution’ (26), but has to integrate the global South from which so many descendants of immigrants in France have come. There is plenty of work yet to do by historians.