Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right

J. Ahearne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137290984
• eBook ISBN: 9781137290991
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Culture, understood broadly, lay at the heart of contrasting right-wing strategies for government in France during the pivotal decade of 2002-2012. Looking at issues of secularism, education, televisual performance, public memory and nation-branding Ahearne analyses how presidents Chirac and Sarkozy sought to redefine contemporary French identity.

1

Reforging Symbols: The New Laicity

It is no doubt an anthropological constant that human groupings are gathered and divided under symbols. The political elites looking to bring populations together as ‘nations’ since the nineteenth century have made ample use of strategic totems – icons, flags, discursive coinages and credal anthems (see, for example, Anderson, 2006; Hobsbawm, 1992). In this they have followed in the steps of emperors and religious leaders before them. These totems were designed to symbolize and reinforce beliefs that enfolded (or locked) an individual within the embrace of the larger group. Of course, the principles that command the allegiance of a modern democratic nation’s citizens introduce important changes into this dynamic. For its champions, the French principle of ‘laicity’ might represent a pre-eminent case in point. The belief that it is supposed to symbolize and reinforce is of a second-degree order: rather than a statement of political or religious fealty, it denotes a belief in the capacity of ordinary (‘lay’) men and women to define and order their own working beliefs. However, the focus of the present chapter is not so much on the philosophy of laicity in abstraction (including its points of difficulty, such as the status of education or of those beliefs that turn against the principle itself). Rather, I want to suggest how, during the decade we are considering (2002–2012), the word ‘laicity’ itself became invested as an emblematic term in what can appear like an altogether more traditional or ‘first-degree’ practice of government-by-symbol.

I use the term ‘symbol’ in this chapter in a strong though not technical sense. It conveys more than the capacity of something to stand as a signifier of something else. As we often use it in everyday language, it indicates here a representation that has become thick with meanings, that connotes more than it denotes or that crystallizes a group’s concerns (for example, ‘the parade has become a symbol of everything that the protestors detest’; ‘the disappearance of red telephone boxes has become a symbol for the passing away of a once familiar world’). The meanings that cluster around symbols are generally, in modern societies, disputed meanings, and the struggles for ownership of symbols, or for their ‘legitimate manipulation’ as Weber might have put it, are a key aspect of the struggle for political hegemony. Such symbolic functions can be assumed not only by things or images of things (a headscarf, for example) but also by abstract words designed to resonate in a distinctively charged manner (laïcité, for example).¹

Laicity 1789–2002: Continuities and ruptures

‘Laicity’ is not a familiar term in English (an exoticism providing ballast to those who have enrolled it, particularly since 1989, as a core feature of a ‘French exception’ defining a distinctive national culture that must be protected). It is perhaps best translated as ‘political secularism’, that is the process by which a State becomes and is maintained as independent of any institutional religious control (as well as, theoretically, the process through which religions become independent of substantive State control).² This can be distinguished from more general processes of ‘social secularization’, that is a declining salience of religious references and norms in the conduct of ordinary social exchanges (whether there has been such a decline is a matter of empirical variation among different global regions and social groups within them (Berger, 1999)). The notion of political secularism is sometimes traced back as far as the synoptic Gospels themselves (‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’) (Coq, 2005, pp. 11–18). In a French context, its political and intellectual precursors can be seen in the attempts to create a specifically ‘political’ position of mediation within the sixteenth-century wars of religion and the ensuing doctrines of ‘tolerance’, as well as in the French monarchy’s ‘gallican’ defence of its prerogatives against papal incursions (Gauchet, 2001, pp. 41–52). Its direct intellectual architects are enlightenment and revolutionary philosophers such as Condorcet, who proposed that a national education system should be set up as a space removed from the teachings and principles of any particular organized religion (the Catholic Church had a virtual monopoly on education in France up to 1789) (Condorcet, 2000, p. 197).

What has undoubtedly facilitated the symbolic investment in the issue, however, is the availability of a distinctive word seen as encapsulating a stable continuity of national approach while remaining sufficiently obscure in practical meaning so as to sustain perpetual interpretative conflict. The philosopher Edgar Quinet began to employ from the 1840s the adjective ‘lay’ in this perspective, distinguishing the ‘general, lay, universal principle’ that should govern French society as a whole from the ‘particular dogmas’ of Catholic, Protestant or Jewish organized religion (Quinet, 2001, p. 172). ‘Lay’ is opposed here, strictly speaking, not to religion as such but to ‘clerical’ control over social organization and cultural transmission (an opposition derived, paradoxically, from Christian thought itself, though with the ‘laity’ extended to signify the people (laos) as a whole rather than simply the non-clerical members of a Church). And as ‘general’ has ‘generality’, and ‘universal’ ‘universality’, so ‘lay’ would soon acquire its own substantive – ‘laicity’. The first occurrences of this can be traced back to the 1871 Paris Commune, but it was the principal architect of the Third Republic’s assertively secular educational system, Ferdinand Buisson, who did most to enshrine and put into general circulation from the 1880s what still appeared to his contemporaries as an unfamiliar neologism (Buisson, 1882). The term has since acquired a historical patina such that it can be associated with an enduring foundation (socle) of French national republican identity (see, for example, Stasi, 2003, p. 111).

The persistence of the term masks, however, discontinuities in sociopolitical contexts and the associated hegemonic struggles to control its meaning. The historian of laicity Jean Baubérot usefully distinguishes three broad ‘thresholds’ in its development (Baubérot, 2004b, pp. 53–68, 247–268). The first (1789–1806) predates the invention of the term, and signifies a programmatic break with the pre-eminent authority of the Catholic Church within the nation and the placing of religious organizations under a controlling State framework. This is marked through certain key moments of the French Revolution, such as the secularization of Church lands, the Civil Constitution or subsequent dechristianization campaigns, as well as the founding moment of the Declaration of the rights of man and the citizen (Article ten: ‘No-one should be troubled on account of their opinions, even their religious opinions, as long as their manifestation does not trouble public order as established by the law’). While the Napoleonic Empire would reverse the anti-clerical edge of the Revolution, it would institutionalize State control, most forcefully through the Concordat of 1802, which ‘recognized’ and subsidized four organized religions within the nation (Catholicism, Lutheranism, the Reformed Church and Judaism). We will see that references to ‘concordataire’ logics of State recognition remain a recurrent move for those who want to criticize or simply describe certain supposed breaches of pure laicity.

Baubérot’s second threshold (1880–1907) corresponds to the ‘universalization’ of republican institutions of socialization – state schooling, most notably, in a series of flagship laws, was separated from religious institutions in terms of staff and curricula and extended so that it was universally available at primary level. This led in 1905 to the formal institutional separation of State and organized religion. After much conflict within the lay camp itself, this finally happened in ‘liberal’ mode: the State was to remain assertively ‘neutral’ in religious matters, but ‘guaranteed’ religious freedoms, rather than seeking to curtail them, as some legislation in the run-up to 1905 had done. Both the 1880s educational legislation and the 1905 law remain ‘sacred’ references in contemporary debate (the adjective is used both ironically and non-ironically), and contribute, along with the persistence of the term ‘laicity’ itself (which does not actually figure in the law), to the sense of a national-republican historical rooting of the debate.

Baubérot’s third threshold (approximately 1968–1989) corresponds to a process of banalization or even disenchantment. The institutions of the Republic that had once been inaugurated with missionary zeal and symbolized emancipation, modernity and democracy were now the objects from within secular society of as virulent a critique as had once been directed at the Church. When it came to issues such as contraception or abortion, the State’s role shifted to mediating between conflicting social groups rather than itself representing a clear-cut party in the dispute. Religious schools themselves had been drawn from 1959 into contractual arrangements with the State, but attempts by the left, traditionally the champions of laicity, to republicanize further the character of those schools met with major resistance and had to be dropped in 1984. Indeed, by the mid-1980s laicity might well have appeared as a largely spent political and cultural issue. The separation of Church and State was widely accepted on all sides, but the hoary Republic as such could hardly appear as a vanguard of historical progress. Debates around the enduring institutional and discursive presence of the Church within the public realm had little mobilizing force beyond the residual professional strata on each side still occupationally invested in their respective causes.

Baubérot initially includes as a further element producing this ‘third threshold’ the increasing visibility of Islam as a new ‘second religion’ in France. This was a long-term process, resulting from the post-war influx of Maghrebin immigrants as a result of demand for low-skilled industrial labour and, after this was halted in the mid-1970s, the subsequent continuation of authorized familial settlement (‘regroupement familial’). After decades of relatively low visibility, however, this Muslim presence burst suddenly and notoriously into public perception in 1989 with the notorious ‘headscarf’ issue (when three young girls were refused admission to their middle school in Creil because they were wearing headscarves construed as religious symbols having no place in a secular educational institution). One can see why Baubérot might initially frame it as a moment that rounds off and consolidates his third threshold, as the State was once more obliged to mediate between social forces in conflict. The Socialist Education Minister Lionel Jospin turned to the highest judicial authority, who provided a compromise ruling to be discussed below. Yet the events of 1989 can also be viewed as early signs of a new dynamic that would change the functioning of ‘laicity’ in contemporary France, reinjecting the now venerable term with a symbolic charge that it had become unaccustomed to carry. This eventually led to the crystallization of a politically realigned ‘new laicity’ in the years between 2002 and 2012.³

Many processes and events came together in 1989 to make it a particularly dense nexus in the recasting of laicity as both a cultural issue and a governmental tool. John Bowen notes that in the previous two years there had been almost a hundred references to Muslim headscarves in Le Monde, but these were all related to Muslim-majority countries, and seemed to carry no particular salience for France. This abruptly changed after September 1989, when the topic, after the trigger of the incident at Creil, suddenly seemed to saturate public space (Bowen, 2007, p. 84). What shifts lay behind this transmutation?

The axes informing the socialist government’s understanding of the political world had shifted since the party came to power in 1981. The economic U-turn of 1983 had undermined their capacity to incarnate an economic alternative to the dominant market order of the West. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed further to discredit any programmatic alternative to the apparently victorious freemarket economics. The new cultural democracy pioneered by Jack Lang and backed by Mitterrand seemed to many to represent a capitulation to the logic of the cultural industries. This was already bringing some on the left to reassert the virtues of a classic enlightenment republican canon as a principle of more authentic political emancipation. The Salman Rushdie affair had made a considerable impact on France, as the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini brought the norms of the disturbingly theocratic government that had emerged from the Iranian revolution of 1979 into Europe itself; closer to France, 1989 had marked the founding of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS), whose political prominence was confirmed the following year (Bowen, 2007, pp. 82–83). When an item appeared on the main evening news of 5 October 1989 recounting the refusal of three young girls to remove their headscarves within the secular bastion of the French collège, it seemed as if these norms were now reaching into France itself. The classically laïque republic, historically a left-wing cause, needed defending.

Thomas Deltombe has traced the role of the media not simply in reporting but in generating many of the ‘affairs’ in which issues relating to laicity have publicly crystallized (Deltombe, 2007). The short report in question was designed initially, according to a routine practice, as a kind of ‘hook’ to induce viewers to watch a longer documentary – entitled ‘Should we fear the believers?’ – that was due to follow the evening news. Its effects in blowing up an issue of apparently national concern, however, went considerably further than this. It exposed a new fault-line in the left, divided between the hard-line anti-clerical proponents of uncompromising laicity and the ‘cultural pluralists’ or defenders of individual pupils’ rights to express their differences. If the left were surprised by this sudden dissensus, the right were relatively mute and initially disorientated. They were certainly not apologists for Islam, but neither were they accustomed to defend laicity with any passion, given their abiding concern to protect the prerogatives of the Catholic Church and Catholic schools.

Other forces were also coming into play in this emerging battle over cultural and religious norms. The new visibility of Islam within France was a product of long-term processes. Initially, the single male immigrants who came from North Africa had remained relatively ‘invisible’ in general public space. Certainly, they were acutely vulnerable to the effects of disindustrialization that gathered pace from the mid-1970s: particularly once the traditional structures of working-class socialization around the communist party and unions weakened, they could find recognition and purpose through associations such as the Tagligh, a worldwide quasi-missionary non-political Islamic movement focused precisely on such destructured and exilic populations (Kepel, 2012, pp. 126–142). But it was essentially the arrival of family and then offspring born in France that changed the profile of Islam in France, particularly once it appeared from the mid-1980s that these offspring were being given few opportunities for full integration into France’s secular institutions. Although it took some time for Muslim organizations fully to recognize the existence of a specifically ‘French’ Islam, it is significant that the most politically mobilized of them, the Union des Organisations Islamiques en France (Union of Islamic Organizations in France), linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, changed its name in 1989 to the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (Union of Islamic Organizations of France – the UOIF; the new preposition was designed to carry a heavy symbolic charge). And as a mobilizing strategy, it was precisely on the issue of headscarves in colleges that they opted to focus (as Gilles Kepel has argued, this would not in the long term turn out to be necessarily a well-judged option (Kepel, pp. 75–76, 90–91)).

The process through which Lionel Jospin defused the initial 1989 crisis is well known. Squeezed between the hard-line laicists of the left urging him not to ‘capitulate’ and the advocates for freedom of expression, he referred the case to the Council of State, who can authoritatively interpret but not make legislation. They ruled that the wearing of the headscarves and other religious insignia was not illicit as such, but only became so if done as an act of ‘pressure, provocation, proselytism or propaganda’, or more generally so as to compromise the pedagogical functioning of the school (Conseil d’État, 1989). Clearly, much was left to supplementary interpretation, and the ground had now shifted such that further ‘affairs’ could be generated through little more than the zeal of a headmaster, a journalist or indeed a Muslim pupil and her family or associates. As further affairs recurrently occupied the always accommodating space of the public media, François Bayrou, the education minister of Chirac’s centre-right government, was brought to rule in 1994, with his sights clearly on the headscarves, that it was ‘not possible to accept in school signs so ostentatious that their signification was precisely to separate certain pupils from the rules of common life in school’, and that these signs constituted in themselves ‘elements of proselytism’ (Education nationale, 1994). The maximalizing thrust that this seemed to augur was not always upheld by the Council of State. Bowen notes how, by the turn of the millennium, the latter had developed a ‘consistent jurisprudence’: school exclusions of girls based solely on the wearing of headscarves were overturned, while exclusions based on various aggravating factors (disruption of public order or failure to attend specific classes) were upheld (Bowen, 2007, p. 92). Exclusions also needed to be preceded by specified mediation attempts (Bayrou had appointed a chief national mediator for these cases, Hanifa Cherifi). Yet despite this more or less reasonable modus vivendi, the concatenation of affairs had led to a far-reaching change in the way ‘laicity’ functioned and resonated in the national political culture.

2002–2004: A law on the veil

For all the purity of its champions’ professions of faith, laicity on the ground has always been a matter of compromise and adjustment (the State maintains Churches built before 1905; it pays salaries to chaplains in schools, prisons and armies; the salary and running costs of the many Catholic schools in contract with the State are publicly funded; the State gives slots on public television to religious currents; municipal councils contrive ways to help in the construction of new places of worship for both Christian and Muslim clienteles; and so forth). The jurisprudence elaborated by the Council of State could have endured as one further form of settled adjustment. What prevented it from doing so?

Global events such as the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States were clearly part of the causal cluster, as was the pervasive reach of the dominant ‘clash of civilizations’ interpretative model that accompanied this (Huntington, 1996). In themselves, however, they cannot explain the wholesale recasting and political realignment of laicity that took place in France between 2002 and 2012. As an indicator of medium-term trends, an IFOP opinion poll conducted shortly after the attacks (22–28 September) revealed, in comparison to a corresponding 1994 poll, increasingly positive attitudes to Muslims among the French population as a whole, and also towards attempts to integrate their religious and cultural aspirations into the national mainstream (even if attitudes to Islam itself as a religion remained relatively negative).⁴ Indeed, when the Socialist Education Minister Jack Lang asked Régis Debray in 2001 to prepare a report on the issue of religious education within French schooling, the agenda on the part of both men was manifestly both pacifying and ecumenical.

Debray conceptualized his brief quite clearly as a ‘cultural’ issue. His thinking had, however, moved well beyond the image of a hard-line laicist that had stuck to him since his involvement in the mediatized agitation around the 1989 headscarf affair. For Debray, the question was less how to integrate unruly foreign religious elements into an unadulterated republican educational sphere. Instead, he argued that traditionally cast ‘laicity’ in French schooling had aggravated rather than mitigated the spread of a generalized ignorance about religious affairs (‘une inculture religieuse’) (Debray, 2002, p. 15). Not only did this leave pupils with a superficial understanding of the ‘cumulative continuity’ constituted by the history of human culture over millennia, and not only, indeed, did it leave students ill-equipped to negotiate the canonical works of the classical French literary tradition (such as Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris ) (Debray, p. 16). It also left them more exposed than they would otherwise have been to the influence of less rationally controlled introductions to religious worldviews (Kepel dates the introduction of middle-eastern Salafism in France to 1990–1991, but with an intensification after 2001, exerting subsequently a normative influence beyond the minority of its strict adherents (Kepel, 2012, pp. 165–173)). Debray argued that religious teaching in schools should not itself be religiously delivered, and indeed, like the landmark Joutard report of 1989, advised against the introduction of a dedicated school subject: he considered that the curricula of history, literature and art could be adapted to integrate religious subject matter from a religiously neutral perspective. Nonetheless, for Debray, it was the culture of laicity itself that needed to be changed: in an influential formulation, he argued for the passage from a ‘laicity of incompetence’ (an education system that was ‘incompetent’, in all senses of the word, for dealing with religious questions) to a ‘laicity of intelligence’ (an education system for which a rational, reasonable and even empathetic approach to religion was not a taboo) (Debray, 2002, p. 43). Debray’s proposals achieved the relatively rare feat of finding acceptance not just from the socialist government who commissioned them but also from the Gaullist government who succeeded them in the spring of 2002. The climate might have appe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Reforging Symbols: The New Laicity
• 2. Transmission: The Collège and the Socle Commun
• 3. Government through Television: Policy and Performance
• 4. Memory: History and National Identity
• 5. Outward Projection: France in the World
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index