Three Muslim children of the Republic—Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, and Amedy Coulibaly—have committed terrible crimes against their countrymen in the name of their faith, but there seems to be little interest, at least among the political and media elite, in attempting to understand the sources of their fanatical hate or the grievances of their coreligionists. The current moment in France is one not of mournful reflection but of intransigence—of the drawing of lines, of questions of allegiance.

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On the cover of its most recent issue, the first since the killings, Charlie Hebdo opted once again to depict the Prophet Muhammad. ("They could not not do it," a former journalist for the magazine rightly remarked to me.) Top editor Gérard Biard, who was away at the time of the shooting, wrote in an editorial of his hope that, now, "the firm defense of laïcité will go without saying for everyone, that we will finally cease, out of posturing, electoral calculus, or cowardice, to legitimate or even tolerate communitarianism and cultural relativism, which open the way to only one thing: religious totalitarianism."

Charlie Hebdo's defense of laïcité may be particularly vigorous, but the siege mentality and assimilationist logic that underlie it—the notion that religion is a threat to France's egalitarian project, and that French citizenship demands the abandonment of all other values and identities for those of the Republic—are in fact, today, the norm.

At its introduction into law, in 1905, laïcité was understood to be a liberal construction, affirming worship rights for all religions. In recent decades, however, with the growth of a visible, practicing Muslim population, it has been interpreted as dictating that religious preferences remain hidden from public view and as requiring that the state refuse accommodations to the religions of its citizens. In practice, laïcité is now invoked to justify restrictions on specifically Muslim practices such as bans on headscarves in public primary schools and among state employees, or the refusal to offer halal meals in schools and prisons. (Defenders of the veil ban in schools note that yarmulkes or crosses of "manifestly excessive dimension" are also prohibited, for equity's sake, but to claim that the law was not written to address the specific phenomenon of Muslim girls wearing headscarves is disingenuous and historically false.)

The social scientist Didier Fassin noted recently in Le Monde that, like all other inhabitants of nominally secular France, Muslims are granted Christmas, Easter, Ascension Thursday, Pentecost Monday, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and All Saints' Day as public holidays. And yet, Fassin wrote, "we call them to the order of laïcité if they miss school or work on the day of Eid," as several Muslim holidays are known. Laïcité prohibits the state from directly funding the construction of any places of worship; still, the French state owns and maintains 39,000 churches, which became state property upon the adoption of laïcité a century ago. (The Catholic Church owns an additional 5,000, built since 1905.) The country counts only about 2,500 Muslim prayer sites and mosques, all of them established or constructed in the 20th or 21st century, most after the mass arrival in the 1960s and 1970s of immigrant workers from the former French colonies of North Africa; none of these mosques are owned or maintained by the state. Though France's self-declared Catholic population is perhaps only six times the size of the country's Muslim population, Catholic churches are about 20 times as numerous as mosques. These are discrepancies that laïcité legitimates; Muslims, and other critics of the system, speak of a "double standard" within the law.