In 2004, the head of the committee in charge of the evaluation of Muslim girls wearing the veil (or headscarf), in French schools, Bernard Stasi, concluded that “the veil stands for the alienation of women”. The students in the French public schools needed to be assimilated into French culture and protected from the negative influences of their families. According to this point of view, that traces its origins back to the Enlightenment, the headscarf was seen as a denial of freedom and reason. French secular values have their origin in the 1789 French Revolution, which embodied the Enlightenment in its quest to realize the values of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Since this time, French political history has been marked by the attempt to achieve the universal values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. A key moment in this struggle took place in 1882 with the introduction of free, compulsory, secular primary and secondary education. Another occurred in 1905 when the French Third Republic emancipated itself from catholic cultural domination with the separation of church and state. More recently, in 2004, the Sarkozy government, targeting the headscarf worn by Muslim girls, banned conspicuous religious displays by students in public schools. And in 2011, Sarkozy effectively banned the burqa, citing security reasons. The attitude in France is that religion is and should be mostly a personal and private affair. However, the secular state has come across new tensions with the outspoken religiosity of incoming immigrant populations. Poverty and lack of opportunity make these groups feel targeted and marginalized (watch episode 35 of VICE for one look at it if you have HBO). Since the ISIS terrorist attacks in January and November of 2015, France has found itself even further divided and confronted with its secular and universal values in relation to immigration and Islam.

In France, the laws that separate religion from the state were drafted to protect the individual from the encroachment of Catholic influence (and thus any and all religious influence). It was seen by early twentieth-century radical republicans as a means of emancipation. One could say it was the freedom from religion. In the US, the laws of separation were drafted to protect religious liberty by preventing a state religion from oppressing other forms of religious worship–the freedom of conscience (or freedom of religion). This simple formulaic description does much to describe the different attitudes of American and French people.

Taking a pause from blogging about the different theories of religion, I am going to outline the book by Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (2007). The book represents the critique by the American progressive left who seek to expose the contradictions and tensions within French secularism and islamophobia in general. French secularism has traditionally been embraced by the political left as a guarantee of freedom from religious control and influence in the public sphere. However, with new waves of immigration and growing cultural diversity, the far right has used secularism as a tool to deny and reject difference rather than guarantee it. For example, the Front National uses secularism as a primary value in its discourse to harass Muslim immigrant populations. This intolerance symbolizes the insecurity of French identity. By outlawing the headscarf in the classroom in 2004, the Sarkozy government was protecting the sacred space where French citizens are formed and assimilated.

Using the 2004 prohibition of wearing the headscarf in public schools as her example, Scott contends in The Politics of the Veil, that in the process of supporting universal rights, French society has promoted illiberal policies that ostracize Muslim minorities. She notes four underlying problems within French society’s treatment of Muslims: an undercurrent of racism, an intolerant secularism, an overly abstract conception of individualism, and an anxiety about female sexuality.

The main punch of Scott’s argument is that French society is blind to its own racism, which is a legacy of its colonial past. Imperial France sought to instill French values and civilization to its colonies that by default treated other peoples as backward and ahistorical. The French saw themselves on a civilizing mission to bring republican, secular, and universalist values. All of this ended with the vicious wars that preceded decolonization. In a twist of fate, after the colonial war in Algeria, former colonized people received special rights of access to France. Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans, the people of the former colonies, began to migrate into France. Now Islam and the veil took on a new meaning. It began to symbolize the fear of reverse colonization–that France would become North African and Muslim from successive immigration waves. This is the message today of members of the far right like Marine Le Pen and the Front Nationale, and argues Scott, this is the true basis for racism behind the intolerance. The laws against students wearing the veil in the classroom are at once a sign of this racism and the affirmation of traditional French, secular, republican identity.

What French liberal values fail to register was that the veil took on several meanings. While it could symbolize the values of a patriarchal religion that placed women in an inferior position, it also became a symbol of freedom and liberation from French domination that sought to unveil Muslim women.

What I find missing from Scott’s analysis is a more thorough explanation of the origin of the anticlerical (those against the political power of the Church) Enlightenment values of the radical republicans who sought not just to limit and marginalize Catholicism to a separate sphere but to secularize and educate the populace with universal and republican principles. The French republican tradition still manifests these anticlerical roots. Radical republicans in the Third Republic (1870-1940) did not believe in the liberty of independence in-and-of-itself and saw Catholicism as the standard bearer of obscurantism; radical republicans promoted the liberty of thought and perfection. They believed that a person could only become free once he or she had successfully accessed the sphere of critical reason. This would allow them to become a citizen of good laws, access rationality and be able to enter the circle of public deliberation. A citizen properly educated would be able to access the truths of Universal Reason that permitted each citizen the liberty of thought and perfection. People must be taught to be free, and sometimes, they must be shown how to emancipate themselves from their own false/irrational beliefs (Phillipe Portier lectures 11-26-2014). This stands against American secularism and the liberty of conscience. In French early twentieth-century anticlerical, republican eyes, the liberty of conscience protects obscurity by impeding the progress of each person to properly access the sphere of reason. Rather than being freed from superstition and backward traditional practices, the liberty of conscience allows such practices to spread and propagate.

Scott articulates more clearly the tensions between individuality and universal values. She notes that there is a powerful fear of having French society fractured into cultural pockets that weaken the link that ties people to the nation. French values of fraternity and equality must be protected from special treatment of particular groups who seek to distinguish themselves from being French. Above all the French Republican tradition, going back to the laws created during the Third Republic, was built to create French citizens first and foremost. Individual identity and difference are a private affair. Individuality must by partially sacrificed for the public good so that everyone belongs and shares the principal values of the Republic. Only this will create public harmony. Scott says that “French universalism insists that sameness is the basis for equality” (12). One could say that French culture is in the business of consciously producing Frenchness (as are all states and culture-the French just do it with added self-awareness).

Critics such as Scott and the political theorist William Connolly argue that the French model of Secularization produces intolerance and discrimination by favoring a secular mode of life over the free expression of different religious convictions. In this analysis, the secular mode of life supported in France is not truly neutral. The Stasi commission that created the 2004 law “revealed the absolutist nature of their beliefs and their fervent nationalism. The school was a ‘sacred’ space; secularism was ‘un meta-idéal humain’…” (98) This critique contends that no true neutral space can exist and that the best way to compensate for this truth is to promote a space for pluralism and the freedom of conscience. Muslims should not be forced to hide their religiosity but allowed the freedom to express it individually.

The third thrust of Scott’s arguments is a critique of French individualism that sees each person as an autonomous being whose “choices did not define them but were expressions of the rational beings they already were” (125). This individualism, far from being real, is a liberal western construction according to Talal Assad and Saba Mahmood. Mahmood suggests we see the self instead as a product of “habituated learning” with no distinction between an inner and outer self, and not subdivided by the dichotomy of the secular and the religious. Scott also suggests an alternative conception of the self by Michael Sandel– the encumbered self that is held by duties it “cannot renounce, even in the face of civil obligation that may conflict” (125). Basically, Scott says it is an injustice that those who cannot neatly separate their public secular responsibilities and their private religious convictions are excluded by French political discourse.

While I find such arguments appealing to my liberal values of social justice, I am struck by the fact that people do change their religions and beliefs and the ontological self developed by Mahmood appears to me to be suspect (but that is another topic).

Lastly, Scott takes aim at the paradoxical values of western female sexuality. Feminism sought to liberate the body from the control of others by removing restrictions. The ability to show one’s body is part of the equality among men and women. Yet the West has ambivalent feelings. They want to free the body, but not too much. When high school girls started wearing g-string underwear with low cut jeans and shirts, many people in France thought this was going too far. Western feminism is faced with the resulting tension of liberating the female body that permits men to further exploit it as an object. Indeed, covering the women, Scott says, deprived “men of an object of sexual desire and undermined the sense of their own masculinity” (159). In contrast, the traditional Muslim perspective sees female sexuality as dangerous to social order; it maintains that there is a difference between the sexes–they are not held to be equal. In France, emancipation reinforces women’s body as a sexual object of men’s gaze, which nonetheless plays an important part in the construction of sexuality.

Scott’s main argument is that the laws prohibiting the wearing of the headscarf in school are really the manifestation of racism and intolerance against Muslims. In 2004, French society hid behind secular laws with the result that it oppressed a religious minority by claiming the veil “was considered inimical to French custom and law because it violated the separation of church and state, insisted on differences among citizens in a nation one and indivisible, and accepted the subordination of women in a republic premised on equality” (2). This conclusion, however, was based on an abstract individuality that does not take into account the “encumbered self” or the self of “habituated learning” that cannot be separated into the simplistic formula of private and public or sacred and secular. In maintaining secularism as an absolute value, French law has denied a more tolerant and pluralistic public space that allows greater tolerance and freedom of conscience. French secular law hoped to save the girls from the obscurity and oppression of traditional communities. However, the practical outcome was self-defeating. In this, Scott and the critics are right: French secularists undermined their own secular, republican values by throwing out of the schools the very same children it most wanted to reach.

The veil in public schools raises the questions of what are the limits of universal values and how should society protect minority groups and individual difference. A couple of years ago, I asked a woman from the Netherlands whether she thought her country deserved the reputation for tolerance that it holds. She said that the people of the Netherlands are actually only tolerant in so far as they are patient enough to wait for the time it takes people to assimilate and become like themselves…