agenda in 2003, when the two daughters of a secular French-Jew converted to Islam. In October 2003, they returned to their school in Aubervilliers wearing headscarves. They were excluded from the school a few days later: it seems that some laïque militants in the school publicized their case, and therefore it was closely followed by the French media.
At first sight, these seem absurd episodes: how could the Republic be threatened by a few hundred (at most a thousand) schoolgirls choosing to wear veils on their heads? How could Chirac, in 2003, publicly associate himself with those who stated that they considered that wearing a veil to be an aggressive act? The contradictions in such arguments seem so obvious: does not Marianne, the buxom symbol of the French Republic, normally cover her hair? Are veil-wearing Catholic nuns also to be understood as aggressive?
At this point we have to consider at least three further dimensions to this issue. First, a general point: schooling occupies an intensely important position within French political culture, and it is no exaggeration to say that the school – understood principally as the state school – is the prime symbol of Republican values. French state schools have also performed reasonably effectively as a means of social promotion for some of the excluded and marginalized.5 For some years, however, schoolteachers have been complaining of a decline in respect for their role, and – perhaps more seriously – of increased levels of aggression and violence in their schools. Such complaints received a powerful expression in a collection of essays and interviews edited by Emmanuel Brenner in 2004, with the provocative, memorable title of The Republic’s Lost Territories.6 The picture that emerges from this work is certainly alarming. Some 405 anti-Semitic acts were recorded in France between September 2000 and January 2002: many of these incidents were violent, and the numbers recorded were undoubtedly increasing. Tags and graffiti were becoming more common in many schools. Students were growing more aggressive and ruder towards staff, and on occasion would challenge teachers or simply refuse to follow lessons. While Brenner was concerned about all forms of racism, he made it clear that the rise in anti-Semitism was the most important issue facing the Republic. He left his readers in no doubt about the cause of this crisis: these acts were the result of a concerted move against Republican values by some Muslims. ‘To denounce the anti-Semitic, anti-French and anti-Republican evolution of a section of the North African community is not to stigmatize them,’ he explained, ‘but is – on the contrary – to defend their right to integration in France.’7 More importantly, Brenner drew an impassioned moral lesson from these events. He thundered to his readers: ‘Let the Republic rise again!’; they had grown too lax; they must fight to prevent ‘the decay’ of the Republic’s values. ‘The whole of French society today seems to be morally and intellectually disarmed when faced with the assertion of religious and identity politics which is at work in the Arabo-Muslim community.’8 This book was also a passionate call to revive a certain Republican activism.
Brenner also provided a clear, easy explanation for the increasing numbers of Muslim women wearing headscarves in public. They were, quite simply, part of an Islamist strategy to subvert the Republic and evidence of a growing illiberalism among the Muslim minority. (In reality, the dynamics and meanings of the veil are far more complex than Brenner’s hasty caricatures suggest: we will return to this point in the next sections.)
Brenner’s book was extremely influential, to the point where its perspectives and analyses had some direct effect on the findings of the Stasi Commission on laïcité.9 Its analysis of the state of French schooling can be questioned. One point which is particularly worrying is the manner in which Brenner conflates all challenges to the established school practices. Can it be argued that, for example, a demand by pupils for special provision so that they can respect Ramadan is the equivalent of a violent, anti-Semitic act? Can it be argued that wearing a Palestinian keffieh is the equivalent of spray-painting a tag on a school wall? These seemed to be the conclusions of the sensationalistic, undifferentiated – and often anecdotal – evidence cited by Brenner. Furthermore, as is nearly always the case in this type of conspiracy literature, the masterminds of the plot are never actually named. True, Brenner makes passing reference to the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UOIF: Union of Islamic Organizations of France – see chapter four), and also notes the activities of a tiny, largely Strasbourg-based party, the Parti des musulmans de France (PMF – Party of French Muslims).10 But it is hard to believe that the UOIF, a group essentially concerned with the administration of mosques, or the tiny PMF have the power to control a plot which – supposedly – stretches across the whole of France’s schools. Moving further from Brenner’s emotionally charged perspectives, one notes how little he refers to social factors. Rather than blaming Muslims for a decline in courtesy and discipline in the schools, it seems more likely that these shifts are related to broader changes in the relationship between school, work and society, which have produced a context in which many young people have intuitively realized that working hard at school will not guarantee them a future in a fluctuating, uncertain and threatening work environment.11 Finally, there is no sensitivity in Brenner’s text to those who find the school to be ‘an instrument of humiliation, of elimination, of yet more discrimination’.12 Teachers, according to Brenner, are always benevolent, well-meaning liberals.
Alongside Brenner’s Republican revivalism, there was also a political dimension in the renewal of interest in French Muslims in 2003–4. Since 1989, there had been a series of largely unsuccessful attempts to create some formal, institutional representation for French Muslims, similar to the organizations which exist for French Catholics, Protestants and Jews (see chapter four). This had been a relatively uncontroversial idea: during the presidential elections of 2002, none of the major candidates had made any prominent reference to this point and – indeed – even laïcité featured rarely in their programmes. Following the dramatic election, however, Chirac was in search of big political gestures which would allow him to appear as a truly national leader. He was also concerned by any successes by potential rivals on his right or left. In the course of 2003, the energetic Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy, seemed at last to be succeeding in building a representative structure for French Muslims. In particular, he appeared to have a stable working relationship with the UOIF. Sarkozy even gave a speech to the organization at its prominent annual congress at Le Bourget, in April 2003. At one point he was noisily booed by the assembled listeners, but he did not come away with a desire to settle scores. It seems possible that this point initiated a political strategy by right-wing politicians loyal to Chirac. For some on the right, Sarkozy’s approach to Islam was ‘too politically correct’.13 They were alarmed by the minister’s growing popularity and sought to outmanoeuvre their rival. Their idea was to strengthen legislation on the presence of religious symbols at schools, specifically the veil, in order to force Sarkozy into a more confrontational position with the UOIF.14
Under these circumstances, veiled schoolgirls acquired a new importance in the national subconscious. They were no longer a few hundred eccentrically dressed youngsters, usually with impeccable school records and good classroom discipline: instead they were the visible representatives of a sinister conspiracy. An editorial in the left-of-centre daily Libération made this point clear: it spoke of ‘a handful of veil-wearers who are exploited, whether voluntarily or not, by fundamentalist strategies’.15 In many cases, discussions of schoolgirls with headscarves spiralled outwards in ever-increasing circles. Judith Kramer’s article in the New Yorker is probably the finest example of this tendency to pile exaggeration on exaggeration: in a thirteen-page essay which begins by discussing the case of a veil-wearing teacher, the text moves on to cite Islamism in France, Islamism in the Arab world, Saudi funding for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Algerian elections of 1991 (in which the Muslim FIS were denied their victory by military action), male violence, pornography, polygamy and female genital mutilation.16 A dissident feminist publication discussing this type of writing accurately observed that ‘veiled women became, in the French imagination, the sign of
