In France la rentrée is under way—the annual rite when families, returning to work and school from long summer vacations, turn the nation’s highways into vast parking lots. But France is also practicing a different kind of collective return—one in which events from a not-too-distant past lurch back into the present—that seems no less a national ritual.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of several events that have to do with Vichy, the authoritarian regime slapped together in 1940 after the nation’s defeat by Nazi Germany. Upon its creation, Vichy set about the business of establishing its bona fides as the legitimate representative of the French nation.
What better way to do this than by creating outsiders? The apparatus and laws of the state were turned against what Vichy’s intellectual guide, Charles Maurras, called “the anti-France"—elements that he defined as a threat to France’s purity and security. Given France’s long tradition of anti-Semitism, Jews topped the list. In a salvo of laws passed in October 1940, known as the Statut des Juifs, the state barred Jewish citizens of France from dozens of professions, while the citizenship of thousands of recently naturalized French Jews was revoked.
France is now in the throes of a national debate over legislation aimed at a different religious minority, Muslims. Earlier this year, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), the Gaullist Party that holds a majority in the two houses, presented its draft for a law that forbids covering one’s face in public. Violators are subject to a fine of 150 euros (approximately $193); if you force a woman to cover her face, expect a jail sentence of one year and a 30,000-euro (about $38,500) fine.
On July 13, the lower house of Parliament passed the law by a vote of 335 to 1. (Socialists abstained from voting, caught like Buridan’s ass between their own republican distaste for the burkha and their equally powerful distaste for the law’s wide scope.) After the Senate votes on the legislation this month—observers predict easy passage—it will land on the desk of the Conseil constitutionnel, France’s Supreme Court. A decision by the court is expected by the end of the year.
No one can say how the court will decide, but everyone agrees the decision will not end the controversy. For more than 20 years, France has been entangled in another item of Muslim clothing—the headscarf. In 1989, three Muslim girls attending a middle school in a Parisian suburb were sanctioned because they refused to take off their headscarves. The government’s efforts at compromise satisfied no one, and the issue re-erupted in 1994 and 2003. Ultimately, the government banned any “conspicuous sign of religious affiliation” from public schools.
Though the law applied to Sikh turbans as well as Jewish skullcaps, everyone knew the law was aimed at the Muslim headscarf. At the time, the headscarf became a provocation only within the walls of a public school. The reason, the French reminded themselves, was that ever since 1789, and more particularly since the late 1800s, the public school has been republican France’s most important vector of assimilation. It was in the forge of public education that teachers, the blacksmiths of a secular France, hammered into being a republican citizenry. Students learned not just to read and to write, but more deeply, they also learned what it meant to be French citizens. (The Republic also introduced compulsory education for girls so that they would be suitable companions for their republican husbands and suitable mothers for future republican citizens.)
Central to “being French” is the republican axiom that all citizens are free and equal. To be French is to be part of a political community committed to a single set of universal values. As one revolutionary famously declared in 1789 during a debate on the enfranchisement of Jews: “Everything must be refused to the Jews as nation and everything granted to the Jews as individuals.”
But a funny thing happened to equality on the way to the forum. From a gleaming abstraction, it became little more than an imperative that all citizens be the same. If equality in practice means submitting to a single set of cultural norms, the ostensibly universal claims of 1789 suddenly look suspiciously French. Any group or individual embodying a different set of cultural values represents at best a challenge, at worst a threat. The reasons for the rhetorical violence aimed at the headscarf thus become clearer. When a public intellectual like André Glucksmann insists the “veil is a terrorist operation,” he might well be excessive and wrong-headed, but he is not being simply perverse. His concern is rooted in the belief that the school, as he wrote, “must remain a place of emancipation.”
These and similar remarks reveal the true victims of this affair. First, much of the French media cast a handful of Muslim schoolgirls as a fifth column busily undermining the foundations of the French Republic rather than as individuals who, in many cases, chose to wear the headscarf. Second, language itself was a victim. What was, in fact, a headscarf had morphed into a veil. In a linguistic sleight of hand that revealed more about the speakers than their subject, the debate shifted from an item covering the head to a weapon disguising one’s very identity.
Given the vast ideological investment in the headscarf, the symbol could not be contained indefinitely behind the walls of the public schools. The burkha (the full-length robe) and niqab (the garment covering just the face) now epitomize an unpleasant controversy that France failed to limit to a restricted realm. For many critics, the burkha is little more than a prison. One prominent feminist, Gisèle Halimi, argues that the physical confinement of the burkha “constitutes a veritable sexual apartheid,” while the philosopher Elisabeth Badinter, in an open letter to “those wearing burkhas,” declares: “While we are trying to establish transparency and equality between the sexes in a modern democracy, you are telling us that this is none of your affair.”
In the wake of decolonization and globalization, many republicans feel the nation is itself now menaced. While the exact number of Muslims living in France is not known—paradoxically because of the republican refusal to categorize citizens by religion or ethnicity—it is estimated at five million (or roughly 8 percent of the population). Given the emotional tenor of the current debate, that may well be five million too many for some Frenchmen and women.
This attitude reflects a tragic irony: The other side of the coin of equality in France is the refusal to acknowledge the desires of some citizens to hold on to certain religious, social, and cultural practices. That there is a wide spectrum of motivations behind these desires has been lost from sight. When we see a Christian wearing a cross, or a Jew in a skullcap, we do not assume that they all have the same motivation for signaling their religious faith, much less have been forced to do so. Why do we fail to attribute the same act of volition to wearers of the veil? Instead, the French risk representing Islam as a monolithic belief system—an ideological foil for the totalizing discourse of French republicanism.
Some historians suggest that there are deep continuities between Vichy and the republics that preceded and followed. In this regard, we might consider one consequence of the Statut des Juifs: Vichy eventually enforced the Nazi order that all Jews living in the occupied zone (roughly the northern half of France occupied by the Germans in 1940) wear the Jewish star on their outer clothing. While the differences between then and now are striking, they nevertheless reflect similar ideological and conceptual preoccupations. One group is forced to wear an article of clothing, while another group is forced to surrender an article of clothing; one group is banished from the nation, while another group is compelled to assimilate. In both cases, however, the nation refuses to tolerate otherness.
The intentions of these two sets of laws could not be any more different: A great distance has been traveled from Vichy’s sartorial law to the Republic’s law against the covering of faces in public. Why, then, does France seem to be standing in place?