The Politics of the Veil (The Public Square) by Joan Wallach Scott

Author:Joan Wallach Scott [Scott, Joan Wallach]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-04-10T18:30:00+00:00

Laïcité

French supporters of the law banning headscarves defined themselves as apostles of secularism. This was not just any secularism but a special French version, at once more universal than any other and unique to French history and French national character (“une singularité française”). This secularism insisted on its truth (and on the danger that religion, a false truth, posed to it). As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, laïcité refers not simply to separation of church and state but to the role of the state in protecting individuals from the claims of religion. It further rests on the notion that the secular and the sacred can be divided in the lives of individuals. Matters of individual conscience are private and should be free from public interference; the state’s job is to protect that privacy. Unlike other secular democracies, wrote Bernard Stasi in the introduction to his commission’s report, “France has raised laïcité to the level of a founding value.”4 The language of Stasi and his colleagues revealed the absolutist nature of their beliefs and their fervent nationalism. The school was a “sacred” space; secularism was “un méta-idéal humain”5 the headscarf ban was necessary to prevent a takeover of the school by “the street.” The battle was cast as a veritable “crisis,” a war to the death between polar opposites: in abstract terms, between the republic and religion, modernity and tradition, reason and superstition; in concrete terms, between contemporary France and Islam. The image of a final conflict between truth and error deliberately invoked past efforts to wrest control of the hearts and minds of citizens from the spiritual and institutional power of the Catholic church, even though Muslims are a small minority with nothing comparable to the social power which organized Catholicism still wields. In fact, repeated references to the purely secular nature of the nation so misrepresented the history of its accommodations with the Catholic church that opponents of the ban charged supporters with hypocrisy. The issue, the critics maintained, was not religion in general but Islam, and not just Islam but “immigrants.” In the end, they argued, the defense of secularism was but another mask for racism.

Historically, laïcité in schools dated to the Third Republic’s Ferry laws (1881–82, 1886), which made primary education compulsory for boys and girls and which effectively banished from the classroom religion as a subject and priests and nuns as teachers. It is important to note that the laws did not expel children who professed the Catholic faith, went to church on Sunday, or wore crosses and other religious medallions to class. “They had no obligation to conceal their religious affiliations.”6 The successful effort to wrest control from the Catholic church—which was considered an enemy of the republic, allied to monarchists who still nurtured dreams of another Bourbon Restoration—defined the school as the place where national unity would be forged, where the children of peasants (who spoke a variety of regional dialects and usually followed the instructions of a priest) would become patriots.

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