INTRODUCTION
For three decades, France's Muslims have been at the center of a national political campaign to restrict the wearing of religious coverings in (certain) public spaces and institutions. This campaign has so far resulted in two key pieces of legislation. In 2004, the French government responded to controversy around headscarf-wearing students by issuing a ban of “ostentatious” religious signs in all public elementary and high schools. Then, following a yearlong debate on Islamic face veils—a term that includes the niqab and burqa, estimated to be worn by fewer than two thousand women across France—the National Assembly voted to prohibit facial coverings in public spaces in 2010.
Scholars have gone to great lengths in trying to understand how France, which many regard as exemplifying a modern, civic approach to immigrant incorporation (Brubaker Reference Brubaker1992), came to adopt this restrictive response to Islamic signs. The prevailing interpretation holds that entrenched republican values, mainly laïcité, the French term for separation of church and state, produce a unique discomfort with public expressions of religion in France (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre2003; Silverman Reference Silverman2007; Thomas Reference Thomas2006). High-profile politicians have corroborated this view by attributing restrictive laws to a widely shared republican “consensus.” Nicolas Sarkozy, who was president at the time of the 2010 face veil ban, alluded to such a “consensus” when stating, “We are an old nation assembled around a certain ideal of human dignity, particularly women's dignity, and around a certain ideal of life in a community. The veil that entirely conceals the face threatens these values, which are for us so fundamental, so essential to the republican contract” (Jarassé Reference Jarassé2010).
Representations of the 2010 face veil ban by the Socialist Party, which until its sweeping 2017 defeat was the hegemonic party of the French left, similarly underscore its rootedness in shared republican values. In July 2013, Socialist Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls described the 2010 ban as “an emancipatory law” that “fosters women's liberation” and embodies a conviction that “secularism is the law and the Republic is shared…” (Valls Reference Valls2013).
The assertion by scholars and politicians that republicanism drives campaigns to restrict (mainly Islamic) religious signs in France obscures the discord and ambiguity that in fact surround such campaigns. While most members of the French National Assembly supported the 2004 law on religious signs in schools, the 2010 face veil ban faced virulent opposition, particularly from Socialists, a large majority of who abstained from the vote to turn it into law (Assemblée Nationale 2010b).Footnote 1 Scholars’ focus on republicanism as the basis of restrictive legislation also glosses over the disparate, and often conflicting, interpretations that actors bring to this concept in public debate (Bowen Reference Bowen2007a; Laborde Reference Laborde2002).
The present study addresses these limitations by proposing that, rather than deriving from republicanism, France's 2010 ban of facial coverings arose in significant part out of political parties’ struggle for the power and legitimacy to govern. I reach this conclusion through a two-stage analysis. First, I use primary and secondary data to trace the shifting dynamics of competition among three political parties: the left-wing Socialists, the center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP),Footnote 2 and the ultra-right National Front (FN). I employ the concept of “political articulation” proposed by de Leon, Desai, and Tugal (Reference de Leon, Desai and Tugal2009; Reference de Leon, Desai, Tugal, de Leon, Desai and Tugal2015) to argue that, in trying to recapture constituencies lost to the National Front from the early 2000s onward, the Socialists and UMP toughened their stances on Islamic religious signs, thus re-articulating the boundaries of French electoral politics. Second, I examine how this re-articulation in turn shaped politicians’ discursive representations of French nationhood in the context of the face veil debate. Based on a qualitative analysis of the Gerin commission—the six-month government inquiry that preceded the 2010 law—I show that the emphasis on reaching “consensus” around the niqab and burqa led to a narrowed understanding of nationhood, one that forecloses full participation and belonging to veiled Islamic women.
By foregrounding the relationship between political articulation and the production of nationhood in France's face veil debate, this study contributes to a critique of social scientists’ tendency to read social actors’ practices through the lens of their own “categories of analysis” (Brubaker and Cooper Reference Brubaker and Cooper2000; Verdery Reference Verdery1993). I show that politicians vying for ascendance in France's electoral system strategically and selectively use republicanism, not as an analytic category, but rather to gain ownership of salient political issues, such as Islamic veiling. The study also adds a new dimension—that of party politics—to scholarship on nationhood's production in contexts of immigrant diversity. Not only was France's 2010 face veil ban subject to intense contestation, but that contestation was also highly productive in shaping parties’ articulations of the boundaries of politics and of the nation itself. By illuminating these processes, the study reveals the generative potential of party political conflict, and its attendant instabilities, for demarcating the parameters of national belonging in debates over minorities’ religious incorporation.
THE FACE VEIL BAN: PREVAILING EXPLANATIONS
Of the approximately eight million Muslims living in France today, a majority draw their origins from Tunisia and Morocco, both protectorates of France until 1956, and Algeria, officially a part of metropolitan France until the end of its bloody war of independence in 1962 (Simon and Tiberj Reference Simon, Tiberj, Beauchemin, Hamelle and Simon2010). Thanks to the colonial legacies that attend them, these populations have become the objects of a highly racialized political discourse, one that portrays Islam as inimical to republican nationhood (Hajjat and Mohammed Reference Hajjat and Mohammed2013) and sees the veil as symbolizing the “foreignness” of French Muslims (Amiraux Reference Amiraux2008).
Although scholars are increasingly attentive to the colonial systems of meaning and power structures attending the French religious signs debate (e.g., Al-Saji Reference Al-Saji2010; Amiraux 2008; Korteweg and Yurdakul Reference Korteweg and Yurdakul2014), the prevailing interpretation holds that republicanism and laïcité motivate campaigns to curtail Islamic signs in France. This interpretation has its roots in studies of French immigration and integration policy. In his influential writings on the subject, for instance, Brubaker identified republicanism as the key “cultural idiom” that prescribes an open and civic conception of nationhood in France (Reference Brubaker1992). Subsequent research has corroborated this emphasis on the republican foundations of French immigration policy. For example, Hollifield's Reference Hollifield, Cornelius, Martin and Hollifield1994 historical study pointed to the impact of a “republican synthesis,” which is both universalist and nationalist, in conferring legitimacy upon legal migration to France and in explaining the continuity of French immigration policy through periods of crisis. The values embedded in republicanism have also been shown to permeate the juridical framings of French immigration, leading to the entrenchment of social rights, including family reunification, in immigration policy (Kawar Reference Kawar2012), and to the adoption of an assimilationist “philosophy of integration” (Favell Reference Favell1998).
While continuing to portray republicanism as a driving force of policy, studies of the recent religious signs debate in France have engendered a more sinister image of it. For instance, since the 2004 ban of “ostentatious” religious signs in schools, several scholars have pointed to a restrictive thrust in the republican ethos. Using terms like “pretext” (Giry Reference Giry2006) and “tradition” (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre2003), they have suggested that republicanism increases the “sensitivity” of the veil question (Thomas Reference Thomas2006), bolstering the image of Islamic religious signs as political weapons (Silverman Reference Silverman2007). Some scholars propose that it is through its permeation into law and policy frames that republicanism dictates responses to religious signs in France (Wiles Reference Wiles2007). Others interpret the impact of republicanism in terms of its effect on the historical relations between church and state (Soper and Fetzer Reference Soper and Fetzer2007).
While they illuminate the discursive themes that French political actors bring to bear in debating the religious signs issue, studies underscoring the causal influence of republicanism over restrictive laws gloss over the multiple and often contradictory meanings that French politicians apply to this concept in the electoral field (Bowen Reference Bowen2007a). These meanings find their origins in the debate over the 1905 Law of Separation between Church and State, which defined secularism in terms of individuals’ right to the free exercise of religion (article 1) and the non-subsidization of religion by the state (article 2).Footnote 3 Far from generating consensus, that debate showcased the importance of three conflicting interpretations of laïcité. A first saw laïcité as a vehicle for destroying the influence of the Catholic Church and de-Christianizing French society. A second view, advocated by followers of Emile Combes, who was leader of the leftist cabinet at the time of the 1905 law, emphasized the need to end privileges for clergymen, but maintained that the state should have control of the church. A third interpretation of laïcité underscored the need to republicanize or democratize the church itself (Laborde Reference Laborde2002).
Therefore, laïcité has been, and indeed remains, the object of multiple and conflicting interpretations in France. Understanding why and how it became the hallmark of campaigns to restrict Islamic signs in France's public sphere thus requires a more intensive investigation of the political contestations that have surrounded those campaigns. It is to this issue that I now turn.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY
Nationalism scholars have long emphasized that nationhood's production involves a battle among political actors for control of the nation “as a legitimizing symbol” (Zubrzycki Reference Zubrzycki2001: 632; Verdery Reference Verdery1993). Yet, political parties have remained conspicuously absent from studies of nation-building in immigrant societies (Triadafilopoulos and Zaslove Reference Triadafilopoulos, Zaslove, Giugni and Passy2006: 176). Below, I draw from the literature on party politics to show that, as they struggle over what constitutes political legitimacy, parties also transform the boundaries of nationhood, with implications for minorities’ positioning within the national “we.”
To conceptualize the role parties play in shaping the boundaries of politics, I employ the concept of “political articulation” offered by de Leon, Desai, and Tugal (Reference de Leon, Desai and Tugal2009; Reference de Leon, Desai, Tugal, de Leon, Desai and Tugal2015; see also Eidlin Reference Eidlin2016). Dissatisfied with society-centric frameworks, which see parties as simple conduits of public opinion, these scholars propose that party political organizations play a constitutive as well as derivative role in the articulation of social identities. By assembling, disassembling, and reassembling disparate constituencies into politically salient voting “blocs,” they argue, parties refashion and solidify various social formations, creating “unity out of disparity” (ibid.: 27).
Contemporary processes of political articulation tend to be marked by the contestations among “traditional” parties, which “orient toward minor questions, the resolution of which tends to maintain the existing social order…” (ibid.: 4), and “integral” parties, which “orient to transformational questions” and, in doing so, “politicize hitherto apolitical social identities” (ibid.: 4–5, 28). In the current political climate, ultra-right parties, whose platforms focus on a rejection of established socio-political systems, and call for a free marketplace and cuts to immigration (Mudde Reference Mudde2013), are the “integral” parties receiving the most scholarly attention. Apart from seeking votes, the primary goal of these parties is to transform what Rovny and Edwards (Reference Rovny and Edwards2012: 58) call the “axis of competition,” by raising contentious issues, such as Islamic veiling, not historically captured by their “traditional” political opponents. The success of ultra-right parties in exacting these transformations is contingent on both the responses of their more moderate competitors and their own ability to assemble diverse constituencies around a unifying platform (Kitschelt Reference Kitschelt1995).
Because “traditional” parties are highly institutionalized and invested in a particular “bundling of political issues,” they have difficulty adapting to the “additional planes of competition” introduced by the ultra-right (Rovny and Edwards Reference Rovny and Edwards2012: 60–61). One solution they can attempt is to compete for ownership of the charged issues that the latter inject into political debate. Since they typically already “own” the ethno-nationalist discourses that inform opposition to immigration, for instance, “traditional” right-wing parties can feasibly adopt aspects of the ultra-right's anti-immigrant stance to maintain their electoral territories. Yet, left-wing parties are also susceptible to “contagion from the right” in this domain. Indeed, several countries have seen a toughening of leftist stances on immigration, with some parties even advocating restricted access to national membership and belonging for newcomers (Bale et al. Reference Bale, Green-Pedersen, Krouwel, Luther and Sitter2010).
A second solution that “traditional” parties adopt in combatting the ultra-right challenge is to reassert the boundaries of “legitimate” politics in ways that exclude their ultra-right competitors. As Hagelund (Reference Hagelund2003) explains, parties of the mainstream right and left frequently retaliate against their more extreme opponents by identifying them as the “indecent other,” whose very existence bolsters their own “decency.” This process of erecting boundaries around what constitutes “decent” politics is illustrated in the case of Norway's anti-immigrant Progress Party. Until it joined in a coalition government with the Conservatives in 2013, this party's presence contributed to a sense of unity in Norwegian electoral politics by serving as the outsider “against which all other parties contrast[ed] themselves” (ibid.: 49).
This process of discursively separating the “insiders” and “outsiders” of electoral politics closely mirrors the interplay between “sameness” and “difference” in national boundary-drawing. At the root of all boundary formation projects, whether these apply to ethnic, religious, or other groupings, is the attempt to distinguish “us” from “them” (Lamont and Molnar Reference Lamont and Molnar2002). Likewise, belonging to the nation is “always constituted vis-à-vis what or who we are not” (Korteweg and Yurdakul Reference Korteweg and Yurdakul2014: 3). In producing a bounded sense of national identity, therefore, national actors must construct a kind of “imagined homogeneity” that downplays “the realities of difference in the populations constituting the nation” (ibid.).
The struggle to demarcate electoral boundaries can also shape national boundary-drawing. According to research, political parties not only contribute to the proliferation of media-produced “imagined communities” (Pakulski and Waters Reference Pakulski and Waters1996); they also influence public opinion on various matters, including immigrants’ belonging to the nation (Bohman Reference Bohman2011) and group identity (Schneider Reference Schneider2004). As the analysis that follows will demonstrate, the jockeying for power among “traditional” and “integral” parties plays a critical, and underappreciated, role in these nation-building processes.
To capture the ways in which competing political parties re-articulated the boundaries of legitimate politics in France, and thus shaped the production of nationhood in the face veil debate, I undertake my analysis in two stages. First, I draw from secondary historical materials, government documents, court decisions, party political materials, and media reports to trace the evolving dynamics of competition among three political parties—the center-right UMP, the left-wing Socialists and the ultra-right National Front—from the 1970s through the 2009–2010 face veil debate. Both highly established and institutionalized “traditional” parties, the UMP and Socialists have largely profiled themselves in terms of their contrasting economic agendas. Although periodically relevant, the themes of secularism and religious incorporation have not historically shaped the “axis of competition” between them. By contrast, the National Front is an “integral” party, known for taking positions that defy established norms of party contention. Since the early 2000s in particular, this party has articulated a new political coalition in France, uniting diverse constituencies around a political outlook that is anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Muslim. In response, I argue, the UMP and Socialists have shored up their own opposition to public expressions of Islam, re-articulating the boundaries of French electoral politics in the process.
To ascertain how this re-articulation of electoral boundaries shaped the production of nationhood in France's face veil debate, I then turn to the Gerin commission: the six-month parliamentary inquiry that preceded the 2010 ban. In my research, I analyzed the commission's two hundred-page report and the full four hundred-page transcripts of its deliberations, including presentations by all seventy-eight of its invited participants.Footnote 4 I also spent the months of October 2012 and March, April, and October of 2013 conducting interviews in Paris and Lyon. Of twenty-nine interviews, nine were conducted with politicians who sat on the Gerin commission board, ten with individuals belonging to various organizations who appeared before the commission as participants, and ten with individuals who did not appear before it but played a key role in the surrounding public debate (see References for a list). I draw upon this textual and interview data to contrast politicians’ claims to “consensus” around the 2010 law with the disagreements that in fact emerged, both among and within France's “traditional” parties, over the face veil ban's implications for French nationhood.
DEMARCATING THE BOUNDARIES OF FRENCH POLITICS: THE 1970S TO 2009
I begin here by identifying the particularities of France's electoral system and establishing which constituencies have historically supported the country's two main “traditional” parties: the UMP and Socialists. I then examine how the National Front challenged the dominance of these parties from the early 2000s onward by assembling diverse constituencies around controversial themes, like Islamic veiling. To assess the effects of this re-articulation on the boundaries of French politics, I consider in a third section the party-political debates that occurred around two key moments in the Islamic signs debate: the 1989 “headscarf affair” and the 2004 law on “ostentatious” religious signs in schools.
France's Electoral System and the Positioning of “Traditional” Parties
France's electoral system is unusual in that it utilizes a two-round approach to electing presidential and parliamentary candidates. In presidential elections, the two candidates to receive the largest number of votes in the first round advance to a second, run-off election, unless a candidate receives more than 50 percent on the first ballot. In legislative elections, all candidates who receive the support of at least 12.5 percent of registered electors reach the second round (unless, again, one surpasses the 50 percent threshold) (Blais and Loewen Reference Blais and Loewen2009: 345). Under this system, large parties, particularly those that attract 20 percent or more of the vote, tend to be overrepresented. Also benefitting are parties involved in coalitions, which are common in the French political system (ibid.: 349–52).
By advantaging large political parties, France's electoral system has helped to solidify two “antagonistically related camps” (Bornschier and Lachat Reference Bornschier and Lachat2009: 360), the make-up of which has shifted since the 1970s. Beginning in that decade, the left-wing camp saw a marked transfer of influence from the Parti communiste de France (Communist Party of France, PCF) to the Socialist Party, which thereafter became the hegemonic party of the French left until its striking defeat in the 2017 presidential election. On the right side of the aisle, the key development has been the consolidation since 2002 of many parties under the single banner of the UMP (which was renamed Les Républicains in 2015).
Over the decades, the Socialists’ strategy for articulating voter concerns has shifted dramatically, as has their relationship to the working class. After becoming the leading voice of the left in the late 1970s, the party sought to further consolidate its advantage over smaller progressive parties by incorporating, even co-opting, “new social movement” issues into its platform. Two main motivations underlay this co-optation strategy. First, “new” issues, such as women's reproductive rights, nuclear energy, and the environment, appealed to France's growing middle class, a key constituency of interest to the Socialists. Second, by appearing more “open” to other currents within the left, the Socialist Party could improve its chances of picking up votes in the second round of elections (Ladrech Reference Ladrech1989: 263–70).
Yet, this co-optation strategy came at a cost since over the longer term it compromised the Socialists’ relationship to working class voters and to class ideology generally. While the party continued to compete with the PCF and with other further left parties for blue-collar support, it effectively became one of “white-collar middle-class membership and votes” (ibid.: 271). In the 2002 election, for instance, the party was destabilized when its presidential candidate, Lionel Jospin, announced that he was “not a Socialist” (Cole Reference Cole2002). This comment, combined with Jospin's general reluctance to engage with the struggles of the industrial working class, alienated left-wing voters and contributed to the Socialists’ failure to reach the second ballot in that election.
On the right, the central plot line since the late 1970s has been the growing predominance of the Rassemblement pour la république (Rally for the Republic, RPR), and the related decline of other right-wing parties, including the more centrist Union pour la démocracie francaise (Union for French democracy, UDF) (Bornschier and Lachat Reference Bornschier and Lachat2009: 364). The RPR solidified its standing in 2002 when its leadership launched a new party: the UMP.Footnote 5 One motivation for the UMP's formation was to restore the authority of the RPR President Jacques Chirac following a poor performance in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections. A second, more institutional imperative behind the UMP's creation was to tighten the connection between the legislative and presidential arenas of the French political system. Although a normative system of cooperation dictated that parties on the right support each other in various ways—including by not threatening other parties’ incumbency in particular ridings—adherence to these norms was not guaranteed (Haegel Reference Haegel2004: 190–91). Therefore, following his election to the presidency in 2002, Chirac felt he could no longer rely solely on the RPR for predominance in the legislative elections, and he sought to consolidate his power through the creation of the UMP.
Throughout these changes to their goals and organizational structures, the Socialist Party and UMP continued to articulate the concerns of two broadly distinct constituencies. The Socialists fared much better in low-income neighborhoods, where many people of North African origin reside (Hargreaves Reference Hargreaves1991: 353). By contrast, the UMP drew much of its support from shopkeepers, craftsmen, and farmers, who tend to concentrate in France's more rural, less diverse regions (Tiberj Reference Tiberj2013). Given this, the prospect of supporting campaigns to restrict veiling in the public sphere should have raised more difficult dilemmas for the Socialists than for the UMP, because it threatened to alienate Muslims, one of the Socialists’ core constituencies (Kern Reference Kern2012). As I will show, these dilemmas were exacerbated by the ascent of the National Front, whose platform reoriented electoral debate in France away from “traditional” concerns like purchasing power, working hours, and benefits and toward “integral” issues such as immigration reform and the future of France in a consolidated Europe.
Shifting the Boundaries of French Electoral Politics: The Rise of the National Front
Founded in 1973, but rising in popularity since the 1980s, the ultra-right National Front has transformed the French political landscape. While it maintains a limited presence in the National Assembly, the party has made significant inroads in regional, presidential, and European parliamentary races. A key turning point occurred in 2002, when its founding leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the political establishment by advancing to the second round of the presidential election, with 16.86 percent of the vote. Elected party leader in 2011, Marine Le Pen has built on that success, polling 17.9 percent of votes in 2012 (Wieviorka Reference Wieviorka, Fieschi, Morris and Caballero2013: 448–49) and advancing to the second round of the 2017 presidential race with 21.3 percent support (Le Monde, 8 May 2017).
Over the forty years of its existence the National Front has varied its methods for articulating the concerns of French voters. In the 1990s, the party shifted from its original focus on the dangers of communism, Marxist thought, and Soviet Russia to highlighting ways in which, it asserted, Europeanization and global capitalist relations threatened France's ability to govern its own cultural and economic affairs. Of growing concern to voters across the ideological spectrum was the question of France's future within a consolidated Europe, and this became the key discursive vehicle by which Jean-Marie Le Pen and his associates profiled themselves as capable of “overcoming the sectarian tendencies of the mainstream French left and right” (Berezin Reference Berezin2009: 89).
This rejection of left-right terminology enabled Le Pen to claim, in the context of debate over Europe's expanding competencies in areas like immigration, security, and currency, that “a vote for him was a vote for France” (ibid.: 149). That strategy proved increasingly successful as the “traditional” parties converged around a program that was pro-Europe and by extension pro-globalization. That convergence was pivotal to the National Front's positioning within the French electoral system, and it enabled Le Pen to utilize elements of left-wing rhetoric, such as anti-capitalism, to forge a discourse that he could then market as “neither right nor left,” but “French” (ibid.: 79).
With the start of the new millennium, a second of the National Front's most defining political claims gained prominence: that immigrants are taking precious jobs away from native French citizens and thus threatening the social fabric of the nation. This claim has polled well with working-class voters, particularly those who inhabit France's older industrial and urbanized regions, which have been hardest hit by economic crisis and where fear and insecurity are most acute (Brechon and Mitra Reference Brechon and Mitra1992: 69–70). The National Front's anti-immigrant platform also coincided with its anti-European stance, since both positions hinged on a proclaimed need to strengthen and secure both the territorial and symbolic boundaries of the French nation.
Recently, the National Front has turned its sights on normalizing or “de-demonizing” its political brand in order to expand its political base (Wieviorka Reference Wieviorka, Fieschi, Morris and Caballero2013). One way the party has effected this transformation is by appointing a woman—Marine Le Pen—to its top post. Having held a prominent position in the FN since 2002, she appeals to voters by combining a kind of “familial charisma” inherited from her father with an ability to distinguish herself as an outsider to mainstream politics (Geva Reference Geva2014). In her effort to “normalize” the party's brand, Le Pen has also reached out to skilled workers, whom she discursively ties to her working-class base by labeling both groups “the invisible and the forgotten,” two terms that she also uses to interpolate farmers, the unemployed, and pensioners (Wieviorka Reference Wieviorka, Fieschi, Morris and Caballero2013: 465).
By unifying disparate constituencies around a culturally and economically protectionist program, the National Front has succeeded in upsetting established voter-party alignments in France. From the UMP, it has siphoned the votes of older constituents, farmers, and the self-employed, as well as those living in rural and economically depressed regions (Perrineau and Ysmal Reference Perrineau, Ysmal, Perrineau and Ysmal2003). Indeed, these are the constituencies whose support enabled Jean-Marie Le Pen to advance to the second round of the 2002 presidential race. From the Socialists, the party has threatened to capture skilled and unskilled voters through its use of “ethno-socialist” and anti-capitalist frames (Reynié Reference Reynié2011).
In the next section, I will examine how the UMP and Socialist parties responded to the electoral threat posed by the National Front in the context of two debates: one surrounding the 1989 “headscarf affair” and the other attending the 2004 law banning religious signs in schools.
The 1989 “Headscarf Affair” and the 2004 Law on “Ostentatious” Religious Signs in Schools
According to de Leon, Desai and, Tugal (Reference de Leon, Desai, Tugal, de Leon, Desai and Tugal2015), the characteristics of the existing social order critically shape the capacity of “integral” parties to re-articulate the boundaries of electoral politics. Because prior articulations can have lasting and constraining effects, periods of social transformation are more conducive to re-articulation. Such transformative circumstances were present in France at the time of the 1989 “headscarf affair.” By that year, public debate over the place of Islam in France had been sparked by the growth of the French Muslim population combined with global controversies, most notably the fatwa against novelist Salmon Rushdie for his allegedly blasphemous portrayal of Mohammed in The Satanic Verses. That debate was further intensified by the mobilization of the Beurs generation,Footnote 6 whose members were beginning to demand their rights as full-fledged French citizens (Bowen Reference Bowen2007b: 166).
These international and domestic shifts set the stage for re-articulating the “blocs” (de Leon, Desai, and Tugal Reference de Leon, Desai, Tugal, de Leon, Desai and Tugal2015) that constitute French electoral politics. In particular, they enabled the National Front to mobilize previously apolitical constituencies around anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim positions, sending shockwaves through French politics. In responding, the “traditional” parties, particularly the Socialists, found themselves constrained both by their own historic programs and by their preexisting positions vis-à-vis the axis of competition. They had to be creative in refashioning prior political articulations, which they did in large part by injecting aspects of the National Front's ethnic nationalism into their own more civic and republican discourses of French nationhood.
The “headscarf affair” of 1989 involved the expulsion of three Muslim girls by a school in Creil (northeast of Paris) for wearing the headscarf. Although the girls agreed, following negotiations with the school principal, to remove their scarves in the classroom, the event sparked a nationwide debate over the meaning of French laïcité and the school's symbolic role as inculcator of republican values (Bowen Reference Bowen2007b). Hoping to subdue the public's concern while maintaining an arm's-length approach, Socialist Minister of Education Lionel Jospin referred the question to the Conseil d’État (Council of State, France's highest administrative court).Footnote 7 The court ruled that school principals should be allowed to determine on a case-by-case basis whether headscarf-wearing girls were proselytizing, an activity that could be banned from school grounds.
The Islamic signs issue resurfaced as a focus of French politics in 2003 when the Minister of the Interior in President Jacques Chirac's UMP government, Nicolas Sarkozy, introduced a policy to prohibit facial coverings in official identity photographs. When debate over this policy sparked a broader discussion of religious signs in schools, Chirac appointed Bernard Stasi, the French OmbudsmanFootnote 8 and a former government Minister, to head an independent investigation into the advisability of a legal ban. Between September and December of 2003, the Stasi commission heard testimony from teachers, intellectuals, politicians, and activists. One of its main recommendations was that ostentatious religious signs should be prohibited in public schools, and this was instituted as law in October 2004.
The partisan battles leading up to and succeeding the 2004 law demonstrate how effective the National Front has been in re-articulating the boundaries of French electoral politics. At the time the law was introduced, the French political establishment was still reeling from Jean-Marie Le Pen's unexpected breakthrough to the second round of the 2002 presidential race. In trying to keep the National Front from accessing the presidency in that election, the UMP candidate Jacques Chirac joined forces with the Socialists in a “republican front” (Noiriel Reference Noiriel2007). This strategy, in which the mainstream parties work together to bar ultra-right candidates, succeeded in the short-term, earning Chirac 82 percent of the vote on the second ballot. Yet, it did not stem the long-term growth of the National Front's electoral base.
Subsequent UMP leaders recognized that a more concerted effort was needed to recapture votes lost to the National Front and turned to co-optation as a strategy of articulation. This approach consisted of siphoning FN support by taking up themes, such as the threat posed by immigration to French national identity, that had attracted certain kinds of voters to Le Pen in 2002, primarily Catholics, working-class voters, people over age fifty, and inhabitants of France's northern regions (Strudel Reference Strudel2007). Nicolas Sarkozy exemplified this co-optation strategy. As Minister of the Interior in Chirac's government, he did not entirely support the proposed ban of religious signs in schools. For this, he was denounced by both UMP rivals and the National Front, who portrayed him as a weak defender of republican values (Bowen Reference Bowen2007b). Sarkozy responded by adopting a much firmer stance on Islamic signs and crafting an image of laïcité as a sacred aspect of French republicanism. In a 2004 speech he stated: “When I enter a mosque, I remove my shoes. When a young Muslim girl enters school, she must remove her headscarf” (Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 Sept. 2003).
By co-opting aspects of the National Front's anti-Muslim stance, Sarkozy succeeded in recapturing a significant proportion of the votes lost by Chirac to Le Pen in 2002. On the eve of the first wave of the 2007 presidential election, 26 percent of those who supported Le Pen in 2002 reported that they intended to vote for Sarkozy. Of those voters, whom commentators labeled “lepéno-sarkozystes,” 94 percent agreed with the statement, “There are too many immigrants in France,” and 86 percent expressed a negative view of Islam (Mayer Reference Mayer2007). Co-optation of National Front themes also enabled Sarkozy to recapture geographic areas Le Pen had seized in 2002, particularly in the north (Bussi and Fourquet Reference Bussi and Fourquet2007: 413), and to increase his support among Catholics, farmers, and voters over fifty (Strudel Reference Strudel2007: 463).
While the UMP was increasing its share of the vote by co-opting National Front themes, the Socialists were falling behind in the battle to “own” the debate over religious signs. Rather than focusing her 2007 campaign for the presidency on this issue, the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal stuck to a traditional leftist discourse centered on issues of education, violence, purchasing power, and the environment. Moreover, while she spoke to the questions of violence and threats to security in France, Royal maintained that social and economic marginalization contributed to these problems. She thus largely refused to adopt a negative tone in characterizing immigration to France (Noiriel Reference Noiriel2007: 106–10).
This campaign strategy proved unsuccessful for Royal, who lost the 2007 race for the presidency, earning 46.94 percent of the vote in the second round. Unlike Sarkozy, the Socialist candidate also profited little from the National Front's decline in that election, claiming only 6 percent of Le Pen's 2002 voters (Mayer Reference Mayer2007). Moreover, while she expanded the Socialists’ reach among blue-collar workers in the Western regions of France, who traditionally vote “yes” to Europe and “no” to Le Pen, Royal lost ground in large city suburbs (Bussi and Fourquet Reference Bussi and Fourquet2007) and she registered a far poorer showing than Sarkozy among Catholics, farmers, small-business owners, and artisans (Strudel Reference Strudel2007).
Once elected President, Sarkozy strengthened his lead over the Socialists even further by inviting religious Catholics, a key National Front constituency, to support his establishment of a renewed conception of laïcité that embraced France's Christian roots. In the famous Latran speech he delivered in December 2007, he asserted: “Laïcité does not have the power to cut France from its Christian roots…. To pull out the root is to erase the meaning [of laïcité], to weaken the cement of national identity, to further weaken those social relationships that crucially depend on symbols and memory. This is why we must hold together the two ends of the chain: assume the Christian roots of France—even develop them—while defending laïcité, which has finally matured” (Le Monde, 20 Dec. 2007).
By rendering the secularity of public spaces almost sacred and linking laïcité to France's Christian heritage, Sarkozy's UMP thus transformed secularism from an organizing principle in French society to a timeless, cultural, and essential aspect of the national imaginary. In monopolizing this conception of laïcité, the party also sought to discredit the Socialists as disloyal and elitist, and in some cases, as collaborators in a Muslim ploy to denigrate French republican values and history (Noiriel Reference Noiriel2007: 103).
In responding to these critiques, left-wing figures, some of them members of the Socialist Party, worked hard to reassert the left's “ownership” of laïcité. Although they echoed the UMP's condemnation of Islamic veiling as an attack on republicanism, the discourses they deployed differed in subtle but important ways from right-wing articulations of this theme. Firstly, left-wing secularists have tended to reject the right's culturalist interpretation of laïcité. For example, although he concedes that France is particularly radical in its conception of laïcité, philosopher and well-known secularism commentator Henri Pena-Ruiz insists on the “universality” of secular principles, noting their impact on diverse societies around the world (Pena-Ruiz Reference Pena-Ruiz2001: 100, 112–15). A second feature distinguishing left-wing discourses of laïcité has been their emphasis on the need for a strong state to secure the secularity of public spaces. Indeed, for leftist thinkers and politicians alike, right-wing portrayals of veiling as an attack on laïcité are an ideological attempt to scale back the powers and influence of the state (ibid.: 23) and turn voters’ attentions away from real social problems (Glavany Reference Glavany2011).
Attempts to recapture laïcité for the left remained central throughout Francois Hollande's presidency from 2012 to 2017. He appointed as Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls, a Socialist MP whose tough stance on “radical” Islam appealed to right-wing voters. With this move, Hollande conveyed to voters that he would take seriously the protection of France's cultural and territorial borders. We will see that this restrictive turn in the Socialist Party's position on religious signs critically informed the production of nationhood in the 2009–2010 face veil debate.Footnote 9
Demarcating the Boundaries of the French Nation: The 2009–2010 Gerin Commission
So far, I have examined how competition among political parties to “own” the religious signs issue in the face of ultra-right competition transformed the boundaries of “legitimate” politics in France. I have argued that, in seeking to deflect the electoral threat posed by a shared political enemy, the National Front, the center-right UMP and left-wing Socialists converged around an increasingly restrictive response to Islamic veiling. I now will consider how this jockeying for power shaped politicians’ representations of French republican nationhood in the context of the 2009–2010 face veil debate.
The Gerin Commission: Mandate, Participants, and Claims to “Consensus”
The Gerin commission came into being following an incident in 2008 in which France's UMP president, Nicolas Sarkozy, denied citizenship to a French resident of Moroccan origin on the grounds that her wearing the face veil signaled a “radical” practice of Islam. When media coverage of the incident sparked a nationwide debate over whether to legally ban this practice on the French territory, a Communist Party member of the National Assembly, and mayor of Venissieux (a heavily immigrant suburb of Lyon), André Gerin, wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister, François Fillon, demanding government action. On 19 June 2009, fifty-eight members of the National Assembly supported Gerin's proposal to launch a government inquiry into the face veil (Le Bars, Le Monde, 18 June 2009).
Between June 2009 and January 2010, Gerin and thirty-one other members of the French National Assembly heard formal presentations from seventy-eight invited guests representing various organizations and social groups on the question of whether and how to legally prohibit facial coverings in public spaces. The commission's two hundred-page report, which it submitted to the National Assembly in January 2010, outlined the philosophical bases for condemning the face veil, a practice that it also proposed to tackle through restrictive immigration policies (Gerin Reference Gerin2010). That report was instrumental to the introduction of a bill to prohibit the “dissimulation of the face in public space” (Assemblée Nationale 2010a), which the National Assembly approved in July 2010.
Despite having played a significant role in the Gerin commission, the Socialist Party instructed its members to abstain from participating in the July 2010 vote, for two reasons. First, party members opposed the UMP government's attempts to frame the face veil as a threat to national identity. This concern arose when, in November 2009, President Sarkozy launched a countrywide debate on “national identity” in which the threat posed by the niqab and burqa featured prominently. In introducing this debate, Sarkozy asserted that, in France, “there is no room for the burqa,… there is no room for women's servitude, under any pretext, in any condition, or in any circumstance” (Le Monde, 12 Nov. 2009). From the perspective of Socialist MP and commission member Jean Glavany, the link thus drawn by Sarkozy between rejection of the burqa and the defense of French national identity produced an image of immigrants as “suspect” or “dangerous” that his party could not accept (Glavany interview).
Second, the Socialists’ decision to abstain from voting stemmed from anger toward the UMP for attempting to “own” the face veil issue by announcing its intention to legally ban this practice even before the Gerin commission had finished deliberating. In an article published in the newspaper Figaro in December 2009, Jean-Francois Copé, then a prominent UMP MP, outlined the conclusions of a working group on the face veil sponsored by his party. “For six months,” he wrote, “deputies in the UMP group questioned experts of various persuasions, including representatives of the Muslim community.” “Our position,” Copé then explained—which was to endorse a law to prohibit facial coverings—stems from the party's “attachment to republican values” (Copé, Le Figaro, 15 Dec. 2009).
The 2010 face veil ban was thus subject to significant conflict among the major parties. That conflict was ultimately concealed, however, beneath attempts to portray the law as the basis of a widely shared republican “consensus.” The Gerin report itself proclaimed such a consensus when it asserted: “The quasi-totality of propositions formulated by the commission form the basis of a consensus. They are founded upon the conviction that it is necessary to convince, educate, and protect, that we must confront public agents with a single objective: to eliminate a practice that contravenes our republican values” (Gerin Reference Gerin2010: 187). The desire to portray the 2010 law as deriving from a “consensus” was also clear in my interviews with Gerin commission members. For example, when I asked whether he observed any fractures in the commission board along party lines, UMP member Georges Mothron answered: “Not at all, it was really by-partisan.” He added, “The vast majority of the commission's members opposed the veil.”
Socialist members of the Gerin commission were similarly intent on emphasizing the strength of the political “consensus” that formed around the need to curtail facial coverings in public space. In our interview, Socialist member Christian Bataille assured me that “we cannot say there is a right-left cleavage” on this question. His colleague Glavany also promoted this image of a cross-party consensus when he told me, “We are all republicans, each and every one of us, with some exceptions on the extreme left and extreme right. We are all republicans with the same set of values.” These statements illustrate the degree to which politicians involved in the Gerin commission were willing to downplay their partisan differences in favor of projecting a united front against the face veil.
Not surprisingly, given the underlying competition among parties to “own” the face veil issue, the position of the National Front was conspicuously left out of this united front. At the time of the Gerin commission, Jean-Marie Le Pen was still that party's leader. Appealing to his Catholic supporters, he was highly ambivalent about outlawing face veils, fearing that such a move might have repercussions for religious expression more generally. However, Marine Le Pen, who by 2009 was a prominent National Front figure and soon to be its leader, took a much tougher, prorestriction stance. In her view, the 2010 face veil ban did not go far enough, since this practice was “merely the tip of the iceberg.” “In reality,” she stated in an interview with Le Parisien on 30 April 2010, “what we need is an integral law that condemns all communalisms, and to inscribe in the constitution that the Republic recognizes no community.”
By the time of my interviews in 2012–2013, French politicians saw Marine Le Pen, and not her father, as the main voice of the National Front. When they mentioned her name, it was usually with the intention of contrasting their own, more reasonable condemnations of the face veil with the unreasonable anti-immigrant discourse of their ultra-right competitor. The UMP's Nicole Ameline drew such a contrast when claiming in our interview: “It is people like Marine Le Pen who create communalism, by causing people to retreat to their identities.” “What we need to do,” Ameline continued, “is the opposite, that is, to be inclusive.” Like many of her counterparts, the UMP MP framed this emphasis on inclusion in terms of a prorestriction secular agenda.
Although both UMP and Socialist MPs stressed their “consensus” that the face veil should be curtailed, when it came to producing a law, there was disagreement within both parties over how best to proceed. Among Socialists, strategic concerns around ownership of the religious signs issue exacerbated a deepening crisis of identity, which caused some members to question the very legitimacy of the face veil ban in relation to the party's historic values. By comparison, the UMP remained relatively united. The divisions that did emerge within that party mainly pertained to the precise justifications for condemning the face veil, which ranged from culture to the economy. I will now unpack the debates within each party and draw out their implications for party political representations of French nationhood.
Right-Wing Political Frames: The Face Veil as Violation of French National Belonging
In the parliamentary vote that took place in July 2010, all but one of the 287 voting members of the UMP voted in favor of the law to prohibit facial coverings in French public space. Although the UMP members of the Gerin commission also overwhelmingly supported the law, they disagreed somewhat over which frames to use in justifying it to the public. Some drew on images of a “clash” between the French Catholic and Islamic religious cultures. Others used the face veil debate as an opportunity to dredge up concerns that immigrants, mainly North Africans, are a drain on the welfare state. As I will show below, both frames ultimately portrayed the face veil as demonstrating religious Muslims’ incapacity to fully belong to the French nation.
In framing the face veil as a threat to French nationhood, UMP members of the Gerin commission relied on the testimony of participants known for articulating a “clash” between “radical” Islam and secular and Christian cultural norms. One was Pascal Hilout, a Moroccan-born blogger and pro-secularism activist. When I interviewed him, he justified his objection to the face veil on the basis that Islam is “the most reactionary of all religions” and thus “a danger to national and social cohesion.” “Democracy,” Hilout argued further, “never manages to flourish where Islam is established.”
Generalized claims of a “clash of civilizations” were echoed by certain UMP members of the commission, including Jacques Myard, who invited Hilout to testify. Speaking generally of Islam's impact on French society, Myard told me: “We have allowed into our territory people who are inassimilable, because Islam is not a religion; it is a civil code.… If you assault the public sphere with religious elements, it will be civil war.” Together, Hilout's and Myard's statements underscore a belief that Islam poses a double threat to French society. On one hand, practices like the face veil violate the cultural requirement of French national belonging by fostering communal ties that weaken national social cohesion. On the other, Islam is believed to threaten the political parameters of belonging by reducing citizens’ engagement in, and thus commitment to, a civic model of participation.
In claiming a fundamental “clash” between Islam and French republican conceptions of participation and national belonging, some of the Gerin commission's UMP members also mobilized a central claim in the National Front's political platform: that immigrants, particularly those of North African origin, are a drain on the welfare state. For instance, when I interviewed UMP commission member Georges Mothron, he alleged that members of this community are engaging in social assistance fraud: “The fraudsters are all of Arab origin. I see it every day and I fight against it. People who are ‘Gaulois’ like me, that is to say people of French origin who do not live off social assistance, know that these people are getting free health care.” Such complaints about social assistance fraud may be seen as deliberately linked to a desire to strengthen the boundary between native French citizens and domestic “others,” or at least Muslim immigrants and their descendants.
In asserting the “otherness” represented by the face veil, right-wing politicians in the Gerin commission further emphasized what they believe is a stark cultural boundary between France and other immigrant nations. Speaking to the contrast with Britain in particular, Mothron commented to me, with seeming regret, “Communalism has become a significant fact of life in Great Britain over the last twenty years. Here [in France] we have the impression that they abandoned the issue, making it difficult for people to live together. There really are, I won't say ghettos, but neighborhoods that are entirely Pakistani or African.” Equally convinced of the basic differences between France and Britain on this issue, Myard used this comparison in our interview to underscore France's unique commitment to gender equality. Adopting more hyperbolic language than his colleague, he stated: “In France, women have always been equal to men. They accompanied men in combat in the Gaullist era and Joan of Arc drove the barbarous English out of France.”
The (false) notion that gender equality constitutes a historic feature of French national identity was also cited by right-wing actors as evidencing the insurmountable boundary between France and the Islamic powers of the Middle East. In the words of Nicole Ameline: “We are not in Saudi Arabia. We are in France. France protects you. It liberates you. Therefore, I fully support the law…. The [burqa] has no place in France, where women are free.” The link that she draws here between women's “protection” and their “liberation” resonates with a frequent claim in French feminist discourse on veiling, that women's capacity for freedom rests on the state's ability to protect them from the sexist cultural practices of foreign “others” (Korteweg and Yurdakul Reference Korteweg and Yurdakul2014). Ameline's statement also strategically links the particularity of French culture to protection of universal rights, like gender equality. By particularizing the universal in this way, she supports her colleagues’ emphasis on France's cultural uniqueness, while appealing to the human rights discourse of the international women's rights movement.
Right-wing members of the Gerin commission board thus used somewhat different frames to justify a ban on the face veil. Some framed the practice as symbolizing the threat of “foreign” elements to the French way of life. Comments in this vein often underscored a need to protect France from the dangers, both cultural and physical, of “radical” Islam. A second frame, which also suggests a co-optation of National Front themes, couched the ban in a need to discourage North African immigrants from allegedly abusing the welfare state. A third treaded more closely on the territory of the left by highlighting France's commitment to protecting “universal” values like gender equality. However, by emphasizing the particularity of the French perspective on this issue, even this line of argumentation served to draw a stark ethno-cultural boundary between native French citizens and foreign “others.” Ultimately, all three right-wing frames utilized in the Gerin commission bolstered a perception that Islamic practices like the face veil violate the cultural and political terms of belonging to the French nation.
Left-Wing Political Frames: Deciding between “Rejection” and “Reclaiming”
With the UMP claiming ownership of the face veil ban, Socialist members of the Gerin commission struggled to assert the left's position in the debate. Divisions emerged as some representatives questioned the compatibility of a legal ban with the party's historic legacy of promoting minorities’ inclusion in the French nation. These divisions produced two discursive frames: “rejecting” the 2010 law as a right-wing attempt to pervert the meaning of laïcité, and “reclaiming” ownership of the face veil question by reframing the law in terms of themes that the left in France already “owns.” The Socialist leadership ultimately chose the second frame, affirming the party's ownership of the face veil issue without fundamentally challenging the right's narrow casting of the criteria for membership in the French nation.
Several left-wing politicians, including influential Socialist members of the Gerin commission, opposed the 2010 law based on its rootedness in racist colonial attitudes to France's North African population. Building on postcolonial feminist scholarship and activism, proponents of this approach targeted the cultural narrowness of the boundaries assigned to national belonging by supporters of the face veil ban. For example, a Socialist member of the Gerin commission, Sandrine Mazetier, stated in our interview, “the motivations of those in favor of legislating seemed instrumental”; the law merely provided them “with an alibi for their racism and Islamo-paranoia.” Others echoed this view, including the commission's sole Green Party member, François de Rugy, who told me he considered boycotting the commission altogether, claiming he knew “very well that, from the outset, Gerin and Raoult [the commission's rapporteur] were pushing a hostile, restrictive agenda.”
Other left-wing proponents of the “rejection” frame turned their gaze on the past, criticizing prior Socialist administrations for their active complicity in allowing an anti-immigrant script to eclipse the party's core progressive values. Such was the view of Danièle Hoffman-Rispal, Gerin commission member and Socialist MP in the largely immigrant Parisian neighborhood of Belleville. Although she supported a National Assembly resolution to condemn the face veil, Hoffman-Rispal expressed deep concern over her colleagues’ failure to recognize the underlying social inequalities that she believes fuel this practice. As she put it to me:
I understand where [this reactive identity in the Muslim community] comes from. It comes from the republic's failure to integrate and from the fact that politics no longer inspires people. In 1968–1969–1970, when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, we thought the world would be better. Today, this fundamental belief is rare. During the last electoral campaign, I spoke with young people in my neighborhood. They told me: “We are on welfare. We no longer know where we're from. We are not considered French. Even with degrees, we can't find work.”
Thus, Hoffman-Rispal maintained that by succumbing to the right's fear-based response to Islamic signs the French left had lost its capacity to generate public support around themes it previously “owned,” like material suffering and inequality. A legal ban on facial coverings, she argued, would only exacerbate the marginalizing effects of prior governments’ failure to meaningfully engage immigrants in the republican project. Mazetier echoed this concern, stating, “The [face veil ban] does not in any way resolve the problem of affirming the republican pact and values of the republic.… We could have legislated to outlaw actions that force particular garments on members of one sex but not the other. But this is not the choice that was made. Instead, the adopted approach merely causes tensions.” The statements by Hoffman-Rispal and Mazetier express a deep anxiety among some Socialists that an anti-immigrant framing of laïcité has displaced the values that once anchored the party's brand.
Given their opposition to a legal ban, one might have expected Hoffman-Rispal and Mazetier to vote against the bill in the National Assembly. However, the competition among parties for issue ownership made such action untenable. To maintain the appearance of party unity, the Socialist leadership called on its representatives to abstain from the July 2010 vote. A large majority complied, with just eighteen party MPs voting in favor of the ban and none voting against (Assemblée Nationale 2010b). When I asked why she did not vote against the law, despite preferring a parliamentary resolution, Hoffman-Rispal replied, “I did not want to draw attention to myself, so I abstained. I told [the Socialist, Radical, Citizen and Diverse Left] group I intended to vote against but they convinced me not to. It was really the only position we could all agree on.”
The Socialist leadership's directive to abstain from voting on the 2010 ban of facial coverings did not preclude members of this and other left-wing parties from attaching their own meanings to the law and thus from participating in the discursive production of French nationhood. These attempts at “reclaiming” the law took both strategic and substantive forms. Strategic attempts to “reclaim” the face veil issue placed party political battles for ownership front-and-center. They raised questions about the extent to which the left in France can be charged with having earlier abandoned the secular project during a period of rising Muslim immigration, leaving the door open to the right to seize control of this issue. Alain Seksig, Inspector General of National Education and former member of the High Council of Integration,Footnote 10 addressed this question in telling me that, had it not been for the left's failure to take a distinctive stance on religious signs, including during the 1989 “headscarf affair,” the right could not have managed to brand itself the defender of secular values and pervert the meaning of secularism in the process. In his words: “The left did not need the National Front to demonstrate its confusion around the issue of secularism. It did that all by itself, like a grown-up. Except that, by demonstrating that confusion over the years, it made a gift of secularism to the extreme right.”
Attempts to “reclaim” the face veil issue by strategic means also laid blame directly on right-wing parties, claiming that politicians on that side of the fence have deliberately sought to shame the left by challenging its commitment to secularism. During the Gerin commission, these shaming attempts were mainly made by Jean-François Copé, then a prominent member of the UMP, who announced his party's intention to legally ban the face veil before the commission had finished deliberating (Le Figaro, 15 Dec. 2009). Staunch proponents of the ban within the Socialist Party perceived Copé’s announcement as disrespecting the process and as an attack on their own secular convictions. Glavany reacted the most strongly, claiming in our interview that Copé’s actions signaled “contempt for the commission.” “It was shocking,” he said, “so we refused to take part in the vote. We said: ‘You take us for imbeciles. From the beginning, you have taken us for imbeciles.’” Rather than take issue with the content of the right's pro-secular discourse, Glavany thus mainly disputed the perceived infringement on the left's electoral territory that this discourse entailed.
Strategic attempts at “reclaiming” laïcité by the left resulted in overt attempts to redraw the partisan boundaries that have been obscured by the discourse of “consensus” around the face veil in France. In some cases, those boundaries demarcate competing parties on the left. In our interview, for instance, Glavany complained, “[Communist MP André Gerin] is not a leftist when it comes to the emphasis on freedom that we generally find on the left…. From the minute he was appointed to chair the commission the French right manipulated and used him, turning him into an ally by granting him this position.” Here, Glavany is thus aiming to strengthen the boundaries around what can legitimately be considered “left-wing” in French politics. Although a major advocate of strict regulation of religious signs in the public sphere, he opposes achieving that objective through total erasure of the ideological distinctions between Socialists and Communists.
In most cases, however, leftist attempts to redraw French partisan boundaries focused on disentangling the secular discourse adopted by the Socialists from that of their main right-wing rival, the UMP. For example, although he claimed a consensus among members of the Gerin commission in other statements, Socialist member Christian Bataille also suggested in our interview that, in embracing laïcité, the UMP was effectively “rallying” around a principle that belongs to the progressive left. Driven by frustration and anger over the right's manipulation of laïcité for political gain, strategic attempts at “reclaiming” the face veil issue thus mainly turned on the question of who “owns” that issue in French politics. What mattered here was not so much how parties differed in their responses to the face veil question, but simply whether their positions could be clearly distinguished. In this way, the discourse of “reclaiming” prioritized political boundaries over national ones.
That said, substantive attempts to “reclaim” the face veil issue by tying it to left-wing political ideals did shape representations of French nationhood in subtle but important ways. In this regard, politicians used various methods to convey the intrinsic bond between left-wing ideology and the French project to preserve and promote the secularity of public space. For example, contrasting the face veil with the progressive goal of engaging citizens in public manifestations of their political belonging, André Gerin bemoaned that there are “some territories [in France] in which there is sharia in the public space.” “For us,” he told me, “the public space is the Republic.” Here, by treating “the Republic” as synonymous with the “public space,” Gerin made clear his belief that republican citizenship involves a particular kind of political engagement. To use Richard Alba's (Reference Alba2005) terminology, a “bright” political boundary is thus needed to exclude ways of organizing citizens’ relationship to the state, such as “sharia” law, that contradict the republican political ethos.
Like his right-wing counterparts, Gerin thus regards the face veil as unsuited to French republican political culture. Unlike them, however, he attributes this unsuitability to the practice's alleged threat to the role of the state. Echoing the symbolic value attributed to the school in the debates preceding the 2004 law on religious signs in public education, Gerin claimed to me: “[Muslim] girls in some areas cannot go to Planned Parenthood because it is forbidden, cannot have relationships outside the Muslim community because it is forbidden, or young teenage girls in some high schools who have medical certificates to exempt them from participating in sports or going to the swimming pool. What does that have to do with the republic and secularism?”
Socialist members of the commission have echoed Gerin's concern that Islamic religious practices impede participation in the welfare state. Describing laïcité as “indistinguishable from the social struggle,” for example, Socialist Jean Glavany has suggested that state religious neutrality is integral to the way France delivers services to its citizenry (Reference Glavany2011: 38). Rather than simply defend laïcité when it is attacked, he further asserted in our interview, “We must promote it through training programs for teachers and in schools. It must be respected in hospitals.” Thus, for both Gerin and Glavany, “reclaiming” the face veil issue means reestablishing the state as the deliverer of services that allow citizens’ full and active participation in a republican and secular public sphere.
Unable, for political reasons, to “reject” the 2010 law in its entirety, left-wing political actors thus focused their attention on the question of who “owns” the religious signs issue in the context of the face veil debate. Resulting attempts to “reclaim” the law took on a substantive form when politicians targeted the “counter-revolutionary” motivations behind right-wing articulations of laïcité. Left-wing actors underscored the need to reestablish the state as the key player in maintaining the secularity of public space and in reaffirming the importance of citizen engagement in the public sphere. In some cases, however, these ideological attempts at “reclaiming” were overshadowed by more strategic concerns. What mattered in such cases was not so much how parties differed in their responses to the face veil question, but simply whether their positions could be distinguished at all. In these instances, the discourse of “reclaiming” gave precedence to political boundaries over national ones.
CONCLUSION
Scholars are continually searching for ways to understand the link, if one exists, between countries’ unique histories, personalities, and “creeds” (Myrdal Reference Myrdal1944) and the methods they adopt for selecting and incorporating newcomers. Many have focused on the historical production and institutionalization of nationhood and have concluded that nation-specific identity discourses provide the essential clue in explaining why states respond differently to immigration-related diversity. I have argued that the resulting focus on ideas, such as republicanism, obscures the important role that political parties play in driving states’ responses to religious signs. Using France's face veil debate as a case study, I have emphasized that, as they compete for the power and legitimacy to govern, political parties also constitute and reconstitute the meaning(s) of nationhood.
In analyzing these processes, I employed the concept of “political articulation” proposed by de Leon, Desai, and Tugal (Reference de Leon, Desai and Tugal2009; Reference de Leon, Desai, Tugal, de Leon, Desai and Tugal2015) to expose the constitutive role that political parties play in forging social identities and mobilizing them for electoral gain. I showed that, in competing with the ultra-right National Front for ownership of the religious signs issue, France's center-right UMP party worked to reassemble voters by co-opting an image of the face veil as anti-republican. This in turn put pressure on the Socialist Party to join in what came to be represented as a “consensus” around the need to prohibit veiling in the name of French republicanism. Because it was forged in conflict, however, that “consensus” was highly fractured and unstable. It remained subject to intense conflict both between and within France's major political parties.
These findings provide new insights for theorizing “political articulation.” They demonstrate the fruitfulness of considering not only the rise and fall of “integral” parties, but also the effects those parties have on the actions of “traditional” party political organizations. In the French case, the “traditional” UMP and Socialist parties did not seek to fully reinvent themselves or try to attract wholly new audiences as a way to deflect the ultra-right political threat. Rather, they took a widely recognized political discourse, republicanism, and imbued it with meanings that coincided with the National Front's anti-immigrant platform. Paying attention to the way “traditional” parties strategically and surreptitiously adopt the discourses of their “integral” foes is essential to understanding parties’ broader articulation struggles in modern electoral systems. A stronger theoretical grasp of this process might well contribute, for instance, to explaining the large-scale partisan realignments currently underway in several democracies, including France.
This study's findings also add a new dimension, that of party politics, to scholarly attempts at redefining French republicanism as “category of practice” rather than an analytic device (Brubaker and Cooper Reference Brubaker and Cooper2000). These attempts are critical, since analytic treatments of republicanism lead scholars to reify certain assumptions about the nature of diversity in France, with real effects on research and policy. For example, Amiraux and Simon (Reference Amiraux and Simon2006) point out that academics’ hesitation to break with the illusion of “universal” republicanism places a taboo on studies that take seriously the significance of racial and ethnic differences in France. Indeed, the power of this “republican myth” is such that discrimination based on race, which is intimately tied to France's long and brutal colonial history, is under-theorized in both politics and academic research (Silverman Reference Silverman2007).
Recognizing the contestations that underlie the production of nation-specific discourses like republicanism is one step toward reversing this tendency. It has been my argument that comprehending the roots of those contestations in the electoral sphere is critical to knowing why states adopt laws that restrict immigrants’ belonging to the nation. I have shown that in France these laws are at least partly the result of highly contested negotiations among “traditional” and “integral” parties over the terms and boundaries of political legitimacy.
A key question for future research is whether and how these processes differ in societies that feature contrasting national political structures and institutions. How might those structures and institutions mediate parties’ representations of nationhood in the debates currently underway across Europe and North America around Muslims’ incorporation? As in France, those contestations frequently revolve around the veil. In August 2018, for instance, Denmark joined France, Belgium, and Austria in prohibiting full facial coverings in public areas. The Netherlands introduced a partial ban in 2015, and in 2016 German Chancellor Angela Merkel endorsed her party's call to ban the full-face veil “wherever it is legally possible.”
The extent to which campaigns aimed at excluding Muslims from the body politic succeed in generating discourses of “consensus” has differed markedly. Here a comparison of France and the majority French-speaking Canadian province of Québec is instructive. As in France, successive debates over the secular boundaries of the nation have left an indelible mark on Québec’s cultural and political landscape (Zubrzycki Reference Zubrzycki2016). Yet, proposals to legislatively restrict the wearing of religious signs in the province’s public spaces and institutions have produced far sharper divisions within and among political parties. Scholarship based on a politics-centered approach—one that highlights the productive role of contestations among “traditional” and “integral” parties—can illuminate the sources of these differences and, in the process, further elucidate the role of party competition in producing nationhood.
