One Nation, Secular and Indivisible

The French National Assembly voted overwhelmingly this week to prohibit wearing ostentatious religious symbols in public schools, and most reporting suggests that the outcome of the March 2 Senate vote is already certain: the ban will be approved and enacted by the time classes resume next September. Strong communitarian inclinations may make such a proposal seem preposterous from an American perspective, but France’s national ethos and the very peculiar role of religion in the country’s political life justify the endorsement this legislation has received from President Chirac and the majority of his cabinet, the legislative body and the people. The law is designed to uphold the uniquely French principle of the secular republican state. It will succeed in doing so by affirming that the public school system, as the apparatus responsible for forging the next generation of citizens of that secular state, should not openly recognize religious differences between its students. Preserving secular principles requires that religious affiliations be expressed only outside the context of the republic and its schools. Wearing ostentatious religious symbols while representing the nation as a public servant or by receiving taxpayer-funded public education is an affront to French values. One need not necessarily share those values in order to concede that France is entitled to protect them. Admittedly, this policy is not only about France’s eighteenth-century republican ideals, but also about the contemporary challenges to those ideals. While the law’s ultimate purpose is to safeguard secularism, its immediate result will be to force adolescent girls who insist on wearing a headscarf in school to give up free public education.

But that consequence is far from arbitrary. A good fraction of the girls who would wear headscarves to school belong to the ranks of young French ethnic Arabs who do not adhere to fundamentalist Islam for cultural reasons; tragically, they feel it has more to offer them than does the French republic. Respected scholar Gilles Kepel describes the engagement of young second- and third-generation French Arabs with the Islamic faith not as the perpetuation of their family’s culture and religion—since many of their parents have given up most Muslim practices—but rather as the invention of a new identity in contention with the national values of a country that has marginalized them ethnically or socioeconomically. For many young women, the headscarf is as much a symbol of repudiation of France as it is a token of belonging to Islam. The intent of the new law is not to undermine cultural diversity—there is no calling into question religious freedom outside the secular setting of public education. It will, however, disarm students of the tools they use in their public schools to define themselves as separate from or even in conflict with each other and republican values. This assurance that students will leave their religion aside as they walk in the door will go a long way towards forestalling the sort of fragmentation between Muslims and non-Muslims that starts in the classroom and that ends up making large numbers of non-Muslims ignorant enough to vote for the racist, anti-immigration presidential candidate Jean-Marie LePen. And, it will hopefully stem the small numbers of Muslims frustrated enough to travel to the Middle East to train for Jihad. American dollar bills read, “In God We Trust,” but French Euro coins say “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” And French experience shows that fraternity develops best when education is kept thoroughly free of religious identifications and separations. Secularism is the fragile basis of national unity in France, and the country’s people and government are quite right to strengthen it.

Daniel B. Holoch ’06, an editorial editor, is an environmental science and public policy concentrator in Quincy House.