three dimensions – public concern with the condition of schooling, political machinations within the parliamentary right and the wild exaggeration of the importance of a few hundred headscarves – played a determining role in the deliberations of the Stasi Commission set up by Chirac, and the somewhat less important Debré Commission created by the National Assembly.
Early in 2003, Chirac chose Bernard Stasi to chair an enquiry into the application of laïcité in the Republic. The Commission opened on 3 July 2003, and presented its final report on 11 December 2003. It had twenty members, of whom six were women, and included nine academics, three officials from educational administration, three politicians, two lawyers, two activists from local associations and one representative from business. Politically, it represented a balance of left-wing and right-wing opinion.18 It included three people with some personal experience of Muslim cultures: Mohammed Arkoun, a 75-year-old authority on Islamic thought, who appears to have remained surprisingly silent during debates; Hanifa Cherifi, the chief negotiator for the education ministry, who did not consider that there was a crisis in the schools, and Gaye Petek, the head of an association working to encourage the integration of Turks into France. The Commission conducted 104 public interviews and about forty private interviews (including contacts with five Masonic lodges).19 It also received some two thousand letters. Questions have been raised about how people were selected for interview: Jean Baubérot, a Commission member, later wondered why all the teachers interviewed seemed to be so firmly anti-veil, when opinion polls indicated that the teaching body was divided on the question.20 The dynamics operating in the Commission are still open to question: of its twenty members only one, the respected conservative historian René Rémond, dissented from its final conclusion. There was a surprising shift in attitudes by a number of Commission members who had previously refused to support legislation banning the veil from state schools. For example, the sociologist Alain Touraine had previously welcomed the ‘modernism’ of a new generation of veil-wearing schoolgirls.21 Why did he change his mind?
It appears that the Stasi Commission initially decided not to interview any veiled schoolgirls. Its brief was to review laïcité in France: during their research, none of the Commission’s members seem to have contacted any of France’s numerous, well-informed and original analysts of Muslim culture. Stasi himself was a 70-year-old Christian Democrat who could remember French anti-Semitism during the Occupation. He was a man of impeccably liberal, anti-racist views, who could boast that each of his four grandparents came from a different nation: Tuscany, Corsica, Cuba and Spain.22 ‘I don’t want to live in a country where there are only white people’ he stated.23 He later spoke out against the politicization of the question of immigration during the 2007 presidential election campaign. Stasi believed in France as a ‘dynamic, living, exemplary’ model of integration through laïcité.24 His only direct contact with a Muslim culture, however, seemed to date from the late 1950s, when he had worked in Algeria in its last years as a French colony.25 His Commission was confused by Muslim practices, and yet they chose to rely on their own resources. As one member later stated: ‘The veil hid a forest, a dense forest, which was difficult to penetrate.’26 The great bulk of the people they interviewed were not Muslims, and the evidence they heard tended to confirm the images previously established by Brenner: there were an increasing number of what might be termed ‘border disputes’ as Muslims began to make specific demands in schools, hospitals and prisons. There was even a broader social dimension: Commission members began to re-conceive the depressed and impoverished banlieues (suburbs) around Paris and other French cities as further examples of ‘lost territories’, ‘in which Islamists run the show’.27 The fact that accurate figures concerning the number of veiled schoolgirls were not available only worried the Commission still further. This was a further sign of laxity, of the frightening inability of Republican authorities to control the dense forest. Under these circumstances, the Commission members found it easiest to follow Brenner’s analysis: there was an insidious plot to undermine the Republic.
Touraine seems to have been one of the few to retain some doubts. He belatedly insisted that the Commission hear from veil-wearing schoolgirls themselves, against Stasi’s original proposal.28 By this moment, most of the Commission members had made up their mind. One (or more?) of the handful of veiled schoolgirls they heard in private recounted ‘the daily humiliation she felt when she was forced to wear the veil’.29 (It seems likely that Chahdortt Djavann’s interview also impressed some members.)30 This was the last piece in the jigsaw: the Commission members now felt confident that in proposing that the veil should be banned from state schools, they were acting to emancipate a generation of Muslim schoolgirls. ‘Thus, without any real debate,’ records Jean Barbérot, ‘it was suggested that one could not really believe in male-female equality and tolerate the headscarf in state schools.’31 In the final report, Stasi declared that ‘the Republic cannot stay deaf to the cries of distress from these young girls’.32
Having heard a litany of France’s problems, the Commission was expected to act.33 Some of its members still doubted whether banning veils from state schools would really solve these issues, but were then faced with the awkward dilemma of how to justify inactivity in the face of pressing problems. Brenner’s book and Kramer’s article show how issues appeared to the Commission members: not acting, not legislating, seemed to be accepting fundamentalism, the creation of ghettoes in France, the rise of intolerance and even female genital mutilation. The sense that they were expected to act weighed heavily on the Commission: Patrick Weill later recalled ‘I must admit that I have never worked under this amount of public pressure coming from all sides.’34 In this situation, it seemed better to do something. After all, the proposed law was ‘the tracing of a border, a limit and not … an atavistic rejection of diversity’.35 Stasi himself put great pressure on his Commission’s members to maintain unity: one morning there was an informal show of hands among the Commission on the subject on banning ‘ostensible’ signs. Three members (including Touraine) voted against the proposal. Stasi spoke personally to all three, stressing how inactivity or neutrality would be perceived by the French public, and insisting on a second vote in the afternoon. Only one member persisted in voting against: Jean Baubérot.36 Moreover, Stasi remained convinced that the purpose of his Commission was not so much to regulate the veil in schools, as to re-create laïcité for the twenty-first century. While excluding certain expressions of Muslim identity with one hand, the Commission devised twenty-six imaginative measures to integrate Muslims and other minorities with the other hand, including the official celebration of Muslim religious festivals in schools, the provision of halal food in school canteens, the provision of Muslim religious facilities in jails and – above all – creating a careful distinction between a legitimate (or ‘discreet’) religiosity and an unacceptable (or ostensible) religiosity in schools. (Unfortunately, while Jewish skull-caps and small crucifixes were deemed discreet, veils, headscarves or hijabs were not.) Commission members with doubts about their actions could therefore reassure themselves that their bulk of their proposals were not condemnatory and exclusionary: their ultimate purpose was to integrate.
Such subtle distinctions were of little concern to the press and to the mass of politicians. The one issue taken from the seventy-two-page report was the proposal to ban the ostensible veil in state schools. Stasi himself seems to have been genuinely surprised by this: ‘What has disturbed me is how the debate has focused on the headscarf, while the mission [of the Commission] was far larger, far greater.’37 Other Commission members shared his disappointment and bewilderment. Gaye Petek told Le Monde ‘how many times did we say that the veil is not the main issue!’38 In one television debate, Stasi proved surprisingly sensitive about criticisms of his work from a leading member of the UOIF. ‘I won’t let you say that I’m attacking the dignity of Muslims. It’s not right to say that France is an anti-Muslim country. It’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong! It’s a lie!’39 Yet the final effect of the Commission’s report was a proposal to aid integration by excluding a few hundred schoolgirls.
Public reactions to this report and the
