of Arab land. Assimilation of the colonized into the colonizers’ culture clearly did not take place and even French colonial policy shifted its goals, and often talked of a looser ideal of ‘association’ between the Republic and the colonized. The illusions drawn from colonial Algeria’s image as an attractive, cheap holiday destination for French people were ended by the appalling violence of the last decade of French rule and left the French population with a gruesome impression of the failure of colonial rule. Worse still, the Algerian crisis threatened to spill over into metropolitan France as brutal police methods were used on Algerian workers in France, and hard-line colonialists terrorized the French Republic itself in 1958–62, raising the nightmare of a military coup.39 Many French people came to feel doubts and even despair concerning the actions taken in the name of colonialism, but far fewer could identify with the struggle taken by Arab Algerian nationalists to liberate their country from colonialism.40
Turning this violent history into a positive story of Republican emancipation was a difficult challenge for even the most strident of the Republic’s defenders. There was, however, one interpretative strategy: loyalists could re-cast French colonial powers as thwarted liberals, beaten by a chasm of misunderstanding that provoked first, the murderous, pseudo-Jacobin terrorism of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and, secondly, political Islam. This alternative interpretative ploy became distinctively more viable during the 1990s, as an Islamic political party (the Front Islamique de Salut) was denied electoral victory in Algeria, and then split and decayed into a set of competing factions, some of them infiltrated, repressed and manipulated by outside forces, producing some of the most horrific examples of terrorist violence on a civilian population ever seen. In particular, one claim was consistently asserted: French colonialism had attempted to liberate Algerian women from the repression of Islam.41 The ‘proof’ for this argument was produced by reference to the ‘veil’: a topic to be discussed in the next chapter.
The important point to stress here is that the history of Algerian colonialism left French people with a set of commonly circulating images by which to understand Muslim and/or Arab populations.42 (Indeed, one problem was precisely that the Algerian experience left many French people unable to distinguish between Arab and Muslim cultures.) The lessons drawn from 130 years of Algerian colonialism taught French people to see Islam as an enemy force, retrograde in its values and violent in its methods. This third colonial, racialized contact has also left a permanent suspicion about almost all forms of Muslim organization. A quip which is re-told by Muslim activists in France today states that: ‘When a group of Bretons meet in the street, it’s called regionalism; when it’s a group of Portuguese, it’s called folklore; and when it’s a group of North Africans, it’s called communautarisme.’43 One point needs to be clarified here: France is probably the only country in the world in which a word linked to the term ‘community’ carries severely negative connotations. ‘Communautarisme’ does not mean an innocent activity to build up a community: instead it means a challenge to the Republican ideal of a transparent, unified public sphere in which all citizens appear as approximate equals, as in the previously cited example of ‘Jews indoors, French citizens outside’. Perhaps the best translation of the term is ‘ghetto-ization’, with the proviso that in this case it is understood as an example of the minority group ‘ghetto-izing’ itself.
This brief review of France’s three contacts with racialized groups suggests how heavily the weight of centuries of history is acting to determine and to structure the apparently spontaneous, commonsense forms of political culture in France today.
Conclusion
This is a book about a group of people, Muslims, with the strong, clear qualification that this term is a provisional, constructed category, often an externally imposed category, which may be surpassed surprisingly quickly by events. While this work certainly makes frequent reference to a religion – Islam – its main purpose is not to study a faith. Instead, our principal topic is the difficult relationship between Muslims and the French Republic: a political form which, in the late nineteenth century, seemed to be the very embodiment of modernity; a form which was secular, democratic (if one is permitted to use this term to describe a regime in which women were denied the vote until 1944) and progressive; a form which seemed to unite diverse peoples in a common national culture. As the epigraph for this chapter suggests, these Republican ideals are at the centre of debates: the Republic was once a form which excited admiration and – in Bouteldja’s words – even love from the non-French people who learnt about it. In studying the relationship between contemporary Muslims and the French Republic, we will note the decline of Republicanism as an effective political form. We will identify an unusual, probably unique, form of racism contained within the Republican form: a virtuous racism, in the words of Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, which could even be termed an anti-racist racism.44
This work will discuss how Republicanism has failed to adapt to the challenges of the twenty-first century. In the words of Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘The Republic has become reactionary’.45 Like President Chirac in September 2003, we are witnessing a silent state funeral.
The War of Symbols: a Chronicle of a Debate Foretold
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The means by which French people were alerted to the issues raised in the previous chapter was through the presence of a few hundred veiled schoolgirls in French state schools. This chapter will first re-tell the story of the ‘war of the veil’, and then consider some key concepts and terms that this clash brought into prominence: laïcité (and the Republican tradition), the veil, integration and beur. My intention in examining these terms is to draw out some hidden political implications concerning how debate was structured: these assumptions form the context for the interventions by our four thinkers.
The war of the veil
It has become commonplace to suggest that the dispute surrounding the status of veiled schoolgirls in French state schools started, out of the blue, in September 1989.1 In that month, three veiled schoolgirls were excluded from the Gabriel-Havez college in Creil, a small town north of Paris, on the grounds that their veils were not compatible with the laïque principles of the French state schooling system. Their veils were relatively light pieces of cloth covering their hair, but not their faces: nothing like the small tents that the Taliban imposed on the women of Kabul. (Indeed, ‘headscarf’ is probably a more accurate word, and was used more widely in the early 1990s. I will use ‘veil’ as it was the most commonly circulating word after 2000.) The Socialist Party was confused by the incident: a substantial minority in the party felt deep loyalty to the ideals of laïcité and therefore strongly supported criticisms of the girls’ behaviour. Party lines were further muddled by the publication of a manifesto in the left-leaning Nouvel Observateur weekly, signed by prominent intellectuals such as Elisabeth Badinter, Régis Debray and Alain Finkielkraut, which called for a stronger defence of laïcité against the threat represented by the schoolgirls. Christian Democrats, normally located in the centre or centre-right of the French political spectrum, were more tolerant of the veiled schoolgirls. A long, tortuous, legal-constitutional argument followed, and it was finally accepted in July 1995 that veil-wearing schoolgirls could be – reluctantly – tolerated in French state schools as long as they did not engage in active attempts to convert other pupils to Islam.2 Disputes continued, and in the late 1990s about 150 cases each year went to a central arbitration body.3
In reality, it is clear that the episode in 1989 was a new chapter in a far longer story that could be dated back to 1830 (the French
