French Muslims. Sharif Gemie
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 the populist, anti-Semitic, proto-fascist new right of the late nineteenth century.105
The most curious point of all is the unity with which all major French political parties proclaim the need to defend laïcité, apparently under attack. But among France’s main political traditions – the Front National, the Gaullists, Christian-Democrats and Socialists – one finds stout defences of laïcité. Among the more minor traditions – the Greens, Muslims, Communists and Trotskyists – one finds some debate and qualification about the nature of laïcité, but certainly nothing like a head-on attack. In fact, in the course of my research, I have only found one writer who criticized the basic principle of laïcité: a contribution to the anarchist weekly Monde libertaire, which was presented even in this publication as a minority opinion.106 One can therefore question this basic premise that laïcité is faced with such a serious onslaught that radical measures are needed in order to defend it.
Attempting to reach a conclusion on such a multifaceted concept like laïcité is difficult. It has been of central importance in the formation of French society. It has worked as a means by which to construct a certain type of modernity, dependent on the evacuation of religious authorities from any integral status within the state and – rather confusingly – it has also created a political space for dialogue between peoples of faith and peoples without faith. More recently, in place of liberty, equality and fraternity, laïcité has become the concept that defines the nature of republicanism. For these reasons, it commands a deep, almost instinctive, sympathy from many French people. However, if one turns to consider how it functions today, the defence of laïcité appears not as the defence of a rational, constitutional principle, but as the construction of an intangible sense of French-ness, in a form which renders the accommodation of new cultures and identities singularly difficult.107 In its current interpretations, it is a cultural ideal which is unsuitable for a world that is increasingly marked by the rapid and easy international transfer of goods, services, ideas and people.
The veil
There is a major problem in discussing this term: the veil does not exist. There is no single Arabic word for this garment, in the form that it is understood by French (and western) commentators.108 And in truth, gentle reader, all my previous references should therefore have been to ‘the veil’ and not to the veil.
Let’s begin our analysis of this term with a true story, from a school in eastern France. An elderly schoolteacher, liked and respected by her colleagues, is beginning her last year before retirement. To her colleagues’ surprise, she appears on the first day of term wearing a Simone de Beauvoir-style bandana. Behind her back, they talk. Obviously, as the teacher in question is French, white and from a laïque family, covering her hair cannot be an indication of her Muslim faith.