This article has been adapted from my undergraduate essay for a class about French colonialism in the 20th Century. It was written in December 2014, just weeks before the onset of the first of two tragic events of 2015. What I have written here does not attempt to discuss current events, nor is it a political analysis of the events. It is above all a piece of cultural and historical analysis.
According to a controversial 2012 survey published by the Institut français d’opinion publique (Ifop), 43% of the polled French citizens view Islam as a “threat to French identity[1]”. The fact that the survey was published for the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro indeed calls into question the reliability of this percentage. Nevertheless, the survey topic regarding Islam and its threat to French identity may offer some insight into the Republic’s political and cultural attitudes towards the highly debated religion since the colonial era. Central to understanding the extent to which these attitudes have changed since the colonial era is the 1905 Church-State separation law of laïcité. Originally an affair of the French métropole and mainly concerned with the separation of the Catholic Church from the public sphere, the law was eventually applied to the colonies via multiple and often contradicting policies throughout the twentieth century. In the twenty-first-century postcolonial context, laïcité has not only again become an affair of the métropole, but also more importantly, after a century’s consolidation, risen to the status of “pierre angulaire du pacte républicain[2]”, thus becoming a marker of French identity. What was then in 1905 a “simple institutional means through which the fundamental ends of freedom of belief and equal respect for different beliefs might be upheld[3]” has at present become “a primarily repressive tool to be directed principally against Islam […], a problem at the interface of government and culture.[4]”
This article aims to reflect on this interface of government and culture, or to be more precise, the relationship between cultural discourse and political policy. I shall attempt to initiate a broad, theoretical discussion about how cultural discourse influences attitudes both cultural (i.e. creating Orientalist perceptions of Islam) and political (i.e. informing policy). This will be followed by a contextualised discussion about a dominant cultural discourse on Islam, focusing on Algeria as the source, and the Mosquée de Paris as a product, of this discourse. Two aspects of Islam will then be explored: policies regarding 1) ‘Muslim immigrants’ and 2) Muslim women in France. Not only revealing of the little change in perceptions of Islam, policies regarding Muslim immigrants also reveal the profound crisis affecting the very idea of the Nation-State as “corps politiques adossés à une culture.[5]” The status of Muslim women, on the other hand, was significant for judging the culturally different, subordinate ‘Other’ throughout the colonial era.
In his book The Idea of Culture, Terry Eagleton explores the tensions between politics and culture: “cultivation…may not only be something we do to ourselves. It may also be something done to us, not least by the political state.[6]” He cites ‘high culture’, embodied in the idea of civilisation, as an example of a Third Republic cultural discourse used to legitimise the mission civilisatrice political policy throughout the colonial era, “[denying] colonial peoples the right to self-government until they are ‘civilised’ enough to exercise it responsibly.[7]” Combined with virulent anticlerical sentiments of the fin-de-siècle period, the stage was set for the Orientalist production of an Islam antithetical to the secular values of the Third Republic: obscurantist instead of enlightening, backward instead of progressive, fanatical instead of rational. Although it must be noted that Foucauldian discourses are multiple and dynamic, in this article it will be argued that a dominant and unified cultural discourse on Islam pervaded the colonial era, informing attitudes both cultural (i.e. Orientalist perceptions of Islamic practices) and political (i.e. how these perceptions went into shaping policies applied to ‘Muslim immigrant’ populations and women).
To focus on Algeria as the source of a cultural discourse on Islam is a good starting point. According to colonial historian Edmund Burke, “the Algerian experience marked the French image of the world of Islam […]. It was through an Algerian lens that Frenchmen viewed other Islamic societies.[8]” Historically, Algeria was the first of the three Maghrebi countries to be colonised by France. Demographically, there was a significantly larger French settler community in Algeria compared to Tunisia and Morocco. Geographically, Algeria was the closest colony to the French métropole, and was often called France’s ‘back door’. The combination of these three factors is problematic for assessing cultural attitudes towards Islam in France, for Algeria, though culturally distinct from France, was precisely considered to be an integral part of France. This meant that Islam, more than a religious and social system, was to be overshadowed by a cultural discourse about it, “and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with [France].[9]” French culture, indeed, “gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.[10]”
This cultural discourse about Islam took on the shape of the Mosquée de Paris, inaugurated in 1926. In addition to commemorating the indigenous soldiers who had participated in the First World War, the mosque, according to Davidson, is also a temple to Islam français, “a blending of French secular republicanism with distinct embodied practices and aesthetics drawn from the French imaginary of orthodox Islam.[11]” As Islam was, at its core, thought to be a “fundamentally foreign entity […], a totalising system that controlled all aspects of Muslim daily life[12]”, Islamic practices therefore “could not possibly accommodate the distinction between private and public lives that twentieth century laïcité required.[13]” However, building the mosque ironically meant violating the law of 1905, for it rendered places of Islamic worship public and visible, bringing Muslims “out into the daylight[14]” whilst paradoxically “pushing them toward accepting the Republic, with its laïcité and integration.[15]” The underlying motive was so the French state would be able to monitor the growing North African population in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s[16].
Interestingly, this political policy regarding ‘Muslim immigrant’ populations has changed little since the colonial era. One way to support this claim is to simply look at 1) the kind of discourse still being circulated in the French press today and 2) its content.
For example, the very use of the term ‘Muslim immigrants’ (immigrés musulmans) is problematic in today’s discourse, especially to designate Algerian Muslims who immigrated to France after Algerian independence. According to a survey published in 2006, 42% of the polled French Muslims identify themselves as French citizens first and Muslims second[17]. And yet, as Davidson argues, by identifying these immigrants as neither ‘Algerians’ nor ‘French’, the French state accomplished important political work, “[denying] them a potential political identity that threatened its authority (Algerian) while at the same time making it impossible for them to lay claim to a different one (French), because of their innate ‘religious’ identity.[18]” Just as referring to French Muslims today as ‘Muslim immigrants’ may be seen as a way to ensure that ‘Muslim immigrants’ remain only Muslim, so the Mosquée de Paris was built to ensure that the Muslim population in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s practice only within this discriminatory space. Political attitudes toward the Muslim population in France have therefore not changed, but, if anything, are symptomatic of a French identity crisis torn between “le droit du sang et le droit du sol.[19]”
The content of today’s French press also points to the almost unchanging adverse political attitude towards the Muslim population in France since the colonial era. Mohammed Moussaoui of the the Conseil représantif du culte musulman affirms that “les Français ne connaissent l’islam qu’à travers l’actualité, qui se concentre sur les faits négatifs comme l’arrestation de radicaux.[20]” Indeed, the controversial Ifop poll of 2012 citing that altogether 60% of polled citizens deem Islam to be too ‘visible’[21] could be seen as a reaction to the attacks of September 11 2001, and going further back, fears of “pan-Islamic” violence and the bomb attacks in Paris and Lyon in the 1990s. Therefore, a growing ‘Muslim’ population in France meant growing paranoia against Islam as a political ideology. This would explain why the 2004 law banning hijab in schools could be conceived. As Prime Minister Raffarin explained in front of the Assemblé Nationale, “the veil and other religious signs take on a political meaning and can no longer be considered as personal signs of religious affiliation.[22]” France’s subsequent Prime Minister, François Fillon, said much about the contradictions within the republican laïc model when he declared: “je préfère des mosquées ouvertes à des caves obscures[23]”. If, indeed, current debates about adversity to the visibility of Islam in France are to be taken seriously, then the question of why the construction of mosques, schools and halal abattoirs were openly encouraged starting in the 1990s must first be answered. As Bowen has argued, the willingness of the French government to help local Islamic groups construct mosques at the very same time that the headscarf affair had sharpened tensions over Islam guaranteed that the state and municipalities can also regulate them[24], just as it was in the 1920s and 1930s.
However, to understand why this political attitude, unfavourable to the Muslim population, has been able to continue since the colonial era will require the analysis of a crucial turning point in French colonial history, namely the invention of yet another discourse. According to Shepard, decolonisation is a discourse, a coping strategy invented to refashion the Algerian Revolution as nothing more than a natural evolutionary step in France’s mission civilisatrice, thus prolonging the legitimacy of the French republican model and making colonialism acceptable[25]. The Crémieux laws of 1870 for instance show that Algerian Jews could be assimilated into France because of their ‘undeniable Frenchness’, thereby “[guaranteeing] that all Algerian Jews were French citizens and, in doing so, [insisting] that assimilation – and, far more importantly, republican universalism – did not need to be rethought in light of Algeria, its French history, or its revolution.[26]” Indeed, the word ‘assimilation’ is still very much part of today’s republican discourse about the Muslim population in France. Though often associated with the Front National, François Fillon of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) surprisingly stated recently that he would like to replace intégration with a politique d’assimilation[27]. Whereas the policy of integration “propose de construire un creuset commun en respectant les différences de chacun[28]”, assimilation is the “renonciation des immigrés à leur culture d’origine, la mise au pas de leur personnalité et leur atomisation au sein de la société qui les absorbe.[29]” In today’s globalised world, where cultural diversity is often seen to be an asset rather than a hindrance to society, political attitudes toward the Muslim population in France have surprisingly changed little since the colonial era. Not able to respect differences of this population, the only possibility, as mentioned above, was to regulate their activities through the building of mosques and other Muslim institutions. “La visibilité brutale de l’Islam dans l’espace français”, as a result, “s’explique par le déclin d’une civilisation qui n’arrive pas à faire le deuil de [son passé colonial].[30]”
It has thus been argued that cultural and political attitudes towards ‘Muslim immigrant’ populations in France have changed little since the colonial era. A dominant cultural discourse about Islam was forged in colonial Algeria. According to this discourse, Islam was a fundamentally foreign entity, and as such it was believed that Muslim practitioners were not able to segregate public from private spaces demanded by the 1905 law of laïcité. This discourse was applied through the mosque-building policy in the 1990s. The institutionalisation of Islam paradoxically breached boundaries between state and religion, revealing the profound crisis affecting the very idea of the Nation-State as “corps politiques adossés à une culture.[31]” The discourse about decolonisation, in turn, served only to perpetuate the conflicted republican model. The fact that the colonialist concept of ‘assimilation’ is still fashionable in today’s postcolonial era indicates the willingness for a traditional republican, ‘common culture and identity’ to be defended against fears of communautarisme. Essentially, contemporary laïcité is a “project of government through culture.[32]”
Whereas cultural and political attitudes towards the Muslim population in France have hardly changed since the colonial era, this is not entirely the case with Muslim women. Eugène Daumas, a French colonial ethnographer in Algeria, wrote in 1856: “the condition of women allows us to evaluate the social state of a people, their mores and level of civilisation.[33]” This observation indeed suggests that during the colonial era, the Arab woman “functioned as an inverted image for confirming the European settlers’ distinct cultural identity, while denying the political existence of the other.[34]” This unflattering cultural discourse about Muslim women “became another way of talking about Islam – about the procreation of the Muslim family and of a social order so utterly different as to make assimilation inconceivable.[35]” In other words, during the colonial era misogynistic cultural attitudes towards Muslim women reflected a broader, cultural perception of a feminine Islam, and this perception influenced change from assimilationist to association colonial policy. Nevertheless, as the line between these two policies was always a fragile one to begin with, it cannot therefore be argued that policy was influenced by cultural attitudes towards Muslim women during the colonial era. As Julia Clancy-Smith affirms, the French Empire never actually had a formal policy regarding Muslim women in Algeria, but preferred instead to collude with Arab males in respecting Algerian Islamic laws regarding Muslim women, such as the right to arrange child marriages, male polygamy, the harem and most importantly, the imposing of the veil upon Muslim women[36].
Daumas was interestingly foreshadowing the headscarf affair of 1989 when he proclaimed that his purpose, as an ethnographer, was to “tear off the veil that still covers the morals, customs and beliefs of Arab society.[37]” The 1994 and 2004 laws banning the hijab in schools confirm this change in political attitude towards Muslim women and Islam from colonial complacency to active Islamophobia. Although the political motives of each respective government are subject to debate and interpretation, the very fact that their attitudes culminated in similar policies does reveal something about the blurring of Left and Right wing ideologies in France. Additionally, this change in political attitude towards Islam was due to growing fears about Islamic fundamentalism following the end of the Soviet Union in 1989. The September 11 attacks of 2001 only aggravated the international political climate of terrorism. Historical circumstances therefore intervened to influence this change in policy regarding Muslim women, and this change in policy was not the result of a change in cultural attitude or discourse about Islam.
I have therefore argued that political and cultural attitudes towards Islam have, for the most part, changed little since the colonial era. What has changed, however, is the implementation of the policy forbidding Muslim girls to wear headscarves in French public schools in the name of laïcité. It was not a change for the better. In December 2014, a request was made by the UMP in December to encourage government officials of the Right and Far Right to not display the crèches de noel in public spaces[38]. French laïcité has indeed moved from being a staple of republican culture to becoming a “project of government through culture[39]”. Although discourses are multiple and dynamic, a dominant cultural discourse about Islam was able to assert a lasting influence on policies regarding ‘Muslim immigrants’ and women since the colonial era. This discourse produced an Islam opposite to the secular values of the Republic, and today we are still living within policies and structures produced by a binary society.
The onslaught of the tragic events of 2015 is a crucial turning point. The stakes are higher than ever, and France now stands before a precipice – it has the choice either to remain stagnant vis-à-vis the changing tides of history, or to reflect upon its outdated discourse and policies and incite positive change.
•••
— C.S.
Footnotes
[1] AFP. ‘L’Islam trop visible pour une majorité qui y voient une “menace”’. http://www.20minutes.fr/france/1029654-20121025-islam-trop-visible-majorite-voient-menace, (accessed 11/12/2014)
[2] Stasi, B. Rapport de la Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République. (2003: La Documentation française), p.21
[3] Ahearne, J. ‘Laïcité: A parallel French cultural policy’ in French Cultural Studies. (2014 25:320), p.324
[4] Ibid., p.325
[5] Wieder,T. ‘Aux racines de l’identité nationale’. http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2009/11/06/aux-racines-de-l-identite-nationale_1263699_823448.html, (accessed 11/12/2014)
[6] Eagleton, T. The Idea of Culture. (Blackwell, 2000), p.6
[7] Ibid., p.7
[8] Burke III, E. The Ethnographic State: France and the Innovation of Moroccan Islam. (UCP, 2014), p.27
[9] Said, E.W. Orientalism. (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1979), p.12
[10] Ibid., p.3
[11] Davidson, N. Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth Century France. (CUP, 2012), p.1
[12] Ibid., p.18
[13] Ibid., p.20
[14] Bowen, J.R. ‘Recognising Islam in France after 9/11’ in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2009 35:3), p.444
[15] Ibid., p.447
[16] Davidson, p.24
[17] Duval, G. ‘Les immigrés menacent-ils l’identité nationale?’. http://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/-les-immigres-menacent-ils-l—identite-nationale—_fr_art_633_45514.html, (accessed 11/12/2014)
[18] Davidson, pp.10-11
[19] Sportouch, B. ‘Intégration, assimilation : à droite le clivage inattendu’. http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/integration-assimilation-a-droite-le-clivage-inattendu_1620089.html#, (accessed 11/12/2014)
[20] AFP
[21] Ibid.
[22] Bowen, p.444
[23] AFP
[24] Bowen, p.447
[25] Shepard, T. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (CUP, 2006)
[26] Shepard, p.247
[27] Sportouch
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Oubrou, T. Un imam en colère. (Bayard, 2012), p.71
[31] Wieder
[32] Ahearne, p.322
[33] Clancy-Smith, J. ‘Islam, Gender and Identities in the Making of French Algeria 1830-1962’ in Domesticating the Empire (Virginia, 1998), p.163
[34] Ibid., pp.155-6
[35] Ibid., p.166
[36] Ibid., p.169
[37] Ibid., p.164
[38] Pham-Le, J. ‘Crèches de Noël interdites: la défense de la laïcité va-t-elle trop loin?’
http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/religion/creches-de-noel-interdites-la-defense-de-la-laicite-va-t-elle-trop-loin_1628969.html#fYJH5SGPJ9DyTWQs.99, (accessed 11/12/2014)
[39] Ahearne, p.322
Bibliography
AFP. ‘L’Islam trop visible pour une majorité qui y voient une “menace”’. http://www.20minutes.fr/france/1029654-20121025-islam-trop-visible-majorite-voient-menace, (accessed 11/12/2014)
Ahearne, Jeremy. ‘Laïcité: A parallel French cultural policy’ in French Cultural Studies. (2014 25:320)
Bowen, J.R. ‘Recognising Islam in France after 9/11’ in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2009 35:3)
Burke III, Edmund. The Ethnographic State: France and the Innovation of Moroccan Islam. (UCP, 2014)
Clancy-Smith, J. ‘Islam, Gender and Identities in the Making of French Algeria 1830-1962’ in Domesticating the Empire (Virginia, 1998)
Davidson, Naomi. Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth Century France. (CUP, 2012)
Duval, Guillaume. ‘Les immigrés menacent-ils l’identité nationale?’. http://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/-les-immigres-menacent-ils-l—identite-nationale—_fr_art_633_45514.html, (accessed 11/12/2014)
Eagleton, Terry. The Idea of Culture. (Blackwell, 2000)
Oubrou, Tareq. Un imam en colère. (Bayard, 2012)
Pham-Le, J. ‘Crèches de Noël interdites: la défense de la laïcité va-t-elle trop loin?’
http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/religion/creches-de-noel-interdites-la-defense-de-la-laicite-va-t-elle-trop-loin_1628969.html#fYJH5SGPJ9DyTWQs.99, (accessed 11/12/2014)
Said, Edward. Orientalism. (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1979)
Shepard, Todd. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (CUP, 2006)
Sportouch, Benjamin. ‘Intégration, assimilation : à droite le clivage inattendu’. http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/integration-assimilation-a-droite-le-clivage-inattendu_1620089.html#, (accessed 11/12/2014)
Stasi, Bernard. Rapport de la Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République. (2003: La Documentation française)
Wieder, Thomas. ‘Aux racines de l’identité nationale’. http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2009/11/06/aux-racines-de-l-identite-nationale_1263699_823448.html, (accessed 11/12/2014)
swasdiburi 