As Mayanthi Fernando stated, Muslim French are “an object of serious consternation in France, and therefore a common object of study for French sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists as well as a common target of governmental intervention” (26). Many of those studies have been policy-driven, and even when not, Muslims are “a problem to be solved” despite what many of them claim as their “right to indifference,” as one of Fernando’s interlocutors put it (26–27). Studies abound about the contemporary presence of Islam in France, some more historical or sociological, or a mix of both, as well as comparative studies about Islam in the West and/or Europe (see among many others Césari, Kepel, Davidson, Fetzer and Sedgwick, Fetzer and Soper, and Thomas). In general discourse, Islam “is either portrayed as a foreign culture, defined essentially by ‘Arab ’ or ‘Muslim’ values as purportedly propagated by North African immigrants; or as a religion , often a fundamentalist one; or as a geopolitical force, in reference to the crises in the Middle East, the umma, and Islamist terrorism ” (Laurence and Vaïsse ix). Three figures have emerged successively to characterize this segment of the population: first the “Arab immigrant” in the 1970s, followed by the “civic Beur ” in the 1980s, and lastly, the “Muslim citizen ” starting in 1989 (Laurence and Vaïsse 7).

Whether it refers to the culture or the religion , the connotation is always that Islam is foreign to France, and some aspects linked to its practice have generated intense debates, from the Muslim headscarf affair in 1989 to the burkini ban in 2016. Jonathan Laurence notes that the general climate in France and Europe does not seem to reflect the optimism of his 2012 title Integrating Islam, given a “succession of official restrictions on the outward expression of Muslim piety,” including the French ban on burqas and the Italian discussion of a moratorium on building mosques following the Swiss ban on minarets among other things (1).

The question of the definition of who is Muslim is a fraught one. Leyla Arslan points out the difficulty of first of all defining and then counting Muslims: “Sociological Muslims (whatever relations they have with religion ) born in Muslim families probably number between 4 and 5 million […]. Using this methodology, Muslims are individuals and their descendants from Muslim countries such as North Africa, Turkey, Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan. The children of the second generation and converts are excluded from this figure” (189). This definition is problematic and exclusive. Fredette considers that being Muslim in France can be a religious or a cultural affiliation (8), while Sharif Gemie is more encompassing and uses the term Muslim to refer to “at once a faith, a culture, and a status ” (12). Traditional estimates range from 2 million practicing Muslims to 6 million if one adds cultural Muslims. Regardless of whether Muslims are believers, cultural, or ethnic Muslims, they have been increasingly accused of communautarisme .

Communautarisme is a difficult term to translate into English, because it does not carry the same baggage in French as in English. Communautarisme implies valuing an affiliation to an ethnic/religious community above integration to the collective, and thus threatens the unity of the Nation . As Gemie notes, “France is probably the only country in the world in which a word linked to the term ‘community ’ carries severely negative connotations. ‘Communautarisme ’ does not mean an innocent activity to build up a community : instead, it means a challenge to the Republican ideal of a transparent, unified public sphere in which all citizens appear as approximate equals” (Gemie 15). The notion of appearances is crucial here, as many controversies in France tend to deal with issues related to religious visibility of Muslims rather than issues of inequalities . Communautarisme has been translated by various terms, including communalism (Bowen 2007; Tolan 47), communitarianism (Roy), ethnic separatism or factionalism (Begag xviii), and ghettoization understood as a move initiated by an ethnic or cultural minority group to retreat from a common secular public domain (Gemie 15; Mazawi 235–236). I choose to retain the term in its original French to encompass all these definitions and keep negative connotations.

Fabrice Dhume-Sonzogni’s survey shows that the term communautarisme is very recent in the press; it started appearing in 1995 and was listed in a dictionary for the first time in 1997 (24–25). It is often linked to multiculturalism, associated with an Anglo-Saxon counter-model that should be rejected (25). Dhume-Sonzogni shows that communautarisme is the mark of the dominant, who labels his legitimate view of the world as ‘universalism ’ and consequently labels what does not fit into it as an illegitimate ‘ communautarisme ’ (31). The anti-communautarisme discourse is paradoxically the only one that talks about communautarisme ; it is therefore less an actual social phenomenon than a manifestation of the fantasy about the Other that is always defined by its supposed origin (Dhume-Sonzogni 34–35). Communautarisme is commonly associated with a repli or withdrawal into self-segregation or protests and demands for specific rights (Tissot).

The concept, if not the term itself, of communautarisme has been used for other minorities in modern France. Elmaleh notes that French society broke with the Jacobine tradition for the first time by recognizing officially the idea of a Jewish community (569). When Elmaleh remarks that WWII first slowed down, then accelerated the process of founding Jewish schools in France that started in the 1920s, he states that he cannot use the term communautarisme to characterize this process because it would be anachronistic to do so, so he names it a “collective awareness of being Jewish in France” “prise de conscience collective de l’être-juif en France” (140), and notes that it will be attributed to Muslims later on (569).

Scholars have noted that in contemporary France, communautarisme , a term that has been increasingly used in politics to stir up ideological electoral gains, always connotes a threat that is posed by Islam (Dhume-Sonzogni 48). As Gérard Noiriel points out in a book that analyzes the use of the concept of national identity during the 2007 presidential campaign, there is no need to explain what communautarisme means because everybody knows it refers to Muslims (L’identité nationale 94). Gemie tells a joke that shows the double standards that are applied to Muslims only among many other groups in France: “When a group of Bretons meet in the street, it’s called regionalism; when it’s a group of Portuguese, it’s called folklore; and when it’s a group of North Africans, it’s called communautarisme ” (15). Muslims are the only group widely seen as partaking in communautarisme through various specific demands and a perceived refusal to integrate; they are the regular target of controversies fueled by the media and politicians (Seniguer).

In an analysis of a report by the Secret Services published in 2004, Tissot examines how designating socioeconomic and racial segregation under the term communautarisme hides the real causes of various failed State policies (lodging, schooling) while putting the blame on the people who are suffering the consequences of those policies. She concludes that there is an inversion of causes and effects: communautarisme is not seen as a consequence of various discriminations, but as the cause of all problems. Communautarisme is thus constructed as the reason for the failure of integration , and not as a consequence or reaction to it (Dhume-Sonzogni 148). Commenting on the criteria that were used for the report, ¹ Dhume-Sonzogni notes that visibility is seen as a sign of repli (withdrawal ) (49–50), and concludes that brandishing the theme of communautarisme functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy (51). Moreover, several scholars have argued that there has been a “racialization of the category of ‘Muslims’” (Talpin et al. 28, Tevanian, Keaton), which has led Pierre Tevanian to write that the word communautarisme has become a “métaphore du racisme respectable” ‘metaphor for respectable racism ,’ in other words, a way to designate a racialized group without having to name Arabs , Blacks, and/or Muslims (cited in Tissot).

Exaggerations and hyperboles played out during the headscarf affair and resurfaced during various controversies. Scholars have noted the disproportionate measures of passing laws or local ordinances to address practices that concerned minuscule numbers. Some of the language used in the campaign for the anti-face covering law is an example of such excess. Regarding the law about face covering in public spaces, Joppke and Torpey note “the disproportionate measure of passing a law to reign in an ultramarginal practice by less than one-tenth of a percent of France’s Muslim population” and that “If one of the main instigators of the burqa campaign, André Gerin, ignoring the tiny numbers laid out to his commission by no less than the interior minister himself, deemed French society in the grip of ‘Talibanization’ and drowning in a ‘marée noire’ (oil slick) of dark Muslim veils , this was moral panic, better understood in psycho-pathological than politicorational terms” (22).

Yet, when laws whose impetus are Muslim signs are passed, they are always phrased in terms that do not single out nor even refer to Muslims, in line with the French ideal of universalism . However, nobody is duped: as Fredette notes, “elite challenges to Muslim citizenship are primarily discursive, and where laws have a disparate impact on Muslims, they are facially neutral and do not single out Muslims in their texts” (Fredette 6). But everybody knew that the 2004 law was spurred by a Muslim sign, just as everybody knows that Muslims are the target when there are talks about passing a new law to ban prayers in the streets, since they are the one religious group that suffers from lack o...