of opinions concerning laïcité, given its cloudy, semi-legal, semi-public nature, how does one ensure that one has understood and accepted these principles? The Muslim activist Dr Abdullah makes a telling point about such processes: ‘often what is not said is more important than the principles to which people refer’.85 For example, a Muslim woman is first informed that religious symbols are not permitted in her workplace, as they would break the code of laïcité. Later, she is told that, of course, a Christmas tree is not a religious symbol and so it is permitted. How is she to react?86 To protest would merely reveal that she has not understood the principles of laïcité, which are immediately obvious to all true French citizens. Laïcité’s confused nature is thus politically useful: it permits inconsistencies and double standards where a clearer, more rational code would better enable minorities to situate themselves within French political culture.
Furthermore, while the values which are asserted in the name of laïcité may sound wholesome and uncontroversial – who could object to freedom and toleration? – the assertion of these values should not be confused with the real embodiment of them. Many pupils find their schooling to be an alienating, meaningless experience. Brenner describes a situation in which Muslim pupils bring prejudices into the school: he ignores another scenario, through which it is the teachers themselves who are prejudiced, and who abuse their position of power to bully and stigmatize pupils. The ‘war of the veil’ certainly provided many examples of ill-treatment, for it stimulated greater public hostility to Muslims in general and veiled women in particular. Examples of ill-treatment in schools are easy to find. First, there was the absurdity of the law, whereby non-Muslim girls were allowed to wear bandanas, but Muslims were often not allowed to do so, because their bandanas were defined by the school authorities as religious symbols. Thus Mona, at school in the Nord, was told that her bandana counted as ‘ostensible’ because she had been a veil-wearer.87 Mariame experienced a ridiculous variant of the same theme: she was wrongly entered in the class register as ‘Marianne’, and therefore not suspected of being an Arab. Under these circumstances, she was allowed to wear a bandana.88 As the law was enforced, more serious incidents took place. A 16-year-old girl, forced to remove her veil, recalls this as a moment of ‘shame, guilt and a burning sense of injustice’. For her, the school becomes a place of ‘hate, never-ending pain and bitterness’.89 One veiled 15-year-old girl, temporarily excluded from classes in September 2004, reported that ‘I was shut in a room with a window. I was forbidden to go out during the breaks. They treated me as if I was a monster! But I’m not a monster!’90 Keltoum from Mantes-la-Jolie suffered a similar treatment: ‘we were held in a separate room, as if we were wild beasts’.91 Sonia was not allowed to go into the schoolyard during recreations, and was even kept out of sight.92 Meetings between veil-wearers and teachers could take the form of tense confrontations as Mariame found out when a female teacher spoke to her.
If you won’t obey the law, you can always go back home.
What do you mean by ‘back home’?
Well … back home!
Yes, but for me, home is here. Where do you want me to go?
You know exactly what I mean.93
Rather than ‘liberating’ these girls, the new law made their lives more difficult. Fadila comments ‘I really think that people are more and more racist, as if the new law gives them a reason to dislike veiled girls. When I catch a bus, it’s crazy. People make signs, jostle me, sneer, whisper as we pass, or shout out insults.’94 Another veiled twelve-year-old had similar experiences. ‘Last year, I was attacked by three men outside the school who spat in my face, hit me, and insulted me. At school, they tell us that we’re weak-minded, and manipulated.’ For these girls, the school is part of a continuum of racist practices in French society, not an oasis of liberty and toleration. As for the new law’s promise of ‘dialogue’, the same veil-wearing girl found that in practice it meant ‘obey or get out’.95 Following the law, and her forced submission to its provisions, another schoolgirl’s reaction was typical: ‘I lost all my confidence: when a whole society and the entirety of the media show us as submissive, fragile and deviant girls, you end up by believing it and dropping out.’96 Shifting our focus to universities, a revealing incident took place at a lecture in the Faculty of Pharmacy in Nantes University on 20 January 2004. A few minutes into his presentation, the lecturer suddenly stopped and stared at a veil-wearing student. ‘What’s that? What’s that veil? Pick up your things and get out.’ There is no suggestion that the student in question had been disruptive in any way. The lecturer later explained his actions to the local paper. ‘It’s very upsetting for the lecturer. She was pissing me about [elle vient se foutre devant moi en me narguant]… I saw it as a provocation. I think of myself as a humanist, but I can’t accept someone trying to impose their vision of the world on me.’97 The blind hypocrisy implied by the lecturer’s words is astonishing: there is not a thought for the public humiliation suffered by the student in question. The student’s simple presence is interpreted as an attack, while the lecturer’s heavy-handed aggression is presented by him as legitimate defence.
Veil-wearing women undoubtedly face forms of harassment and hostility, running from a simple, unthinking fear of the unknown, to more sinister forms of deliberately organized racism. Under these circumstances, one might have expected that the representatives of the Republic, those who pride themselves on their commitment to fraternity and integration, would have chosen to demonstrate to the people of France that these young women should also be accepted as citizens of France. If Chirac could make this type of gesture for a dead tramp, then why not for a veil-wearing schoolgirl? Instead, the leaders of the French state chose to act in precisely the opposite manner: they chose to add to the stigmatization and hostility which these women face.
The call to defend laïcité echoes through these debates. In Tunis, Chirac had described the veil as ‘aggressive’. Brenner’s calculated use of military or colonial metaphors – ‘the lost territories’ – is a second example of the same stance. To this was added a new presentation of laïcité as weak. Debray wrote of a vast theocratic onslaught on vulnerable secular societies.98 Chirac spoke of laïcité as a ‘subtle, precious and fragile balance’.99 The conservative politician Debré wrote in his report that French inactivity in the face of threats appeared as ‘admitting weakness, a sign of impotence’.100 The veil constituted ‘the start of an attack on republican laïcité’, argued the laïque polemist Michèle Vianès.101 Stasi spoke of teachers who felt that they were the ‘victims’ of a permanent guerrilla campaign against laïcité.102
These phrases are both dangerous and significant. They are dangerous because – as in the examples cited above – they encourage and justify aggressive actions against veil-wearing girls, on the grounds that this is a form of pre-emptive strike. But they are also significant, as they suggest an important shift in Republican political culture. Putting them together, one gets a picture of a Republic which is honest, slow to react to provocation, perhaps just a little too well-meaning and benevolent for its own good, which is being outmanoeuvred by a mysterious, malign and unnamed international conspiracy of highly organized militants … a near-perfect reproduction of the worldview of the anti-Semitic anti-Dreyfusards of the 1890s.103 The far right is exploiting precisely this sort of discourse. Philippe de Villiers bemoans the fate of France, split between the France of ‘globalized elites’ and ‘the France that is suffering’. ‘The Republic has entrenched itself in a laïc citadel, on which the tsunami on Islamism is crashing down.’104 The emotion which well-established politicians bring to the theme of laïcité, their unprincipled stigmatization of a minority group within French society as the base for a subversive conspiracy and their appeal to a sense of victimization among the mass of the French population produces a political culture which increasingly resembles that of
