It is entirely appropriate that a Corsican mayor should have leapt early on to the burkini bandwagon by banning the wearing of such clothing on his beaches. The mayor of Sisco followed the example of the mayor of Nice, and their action has since received the backing of Manuel Valls, France’s prime minister, who declared that wearing a burkini is “not compatible with the values of France and the Republic.”
Corsica, after all, was championed by no less than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century philosopher and man of letters, as a candidate for model government. He wrote in “The Social Contract that “There is still in Europe one country capable of being given laws — Corsica.” Indeed, in 1765 he drafted a constitution for the island, which had recently liberated itself from Genoese rule.
Those of us conditioned to see French politics as a perpetual replaying of the incomplete French Revolution don’t have to work hard to see a burkini ban as a victory for Rousseau and the Rousseau-ists over the tolerance championed by that other Enlightenment giant, Voltaire.
According to this line of reasoning, the post-Enlightenment duty of the state is to stand up for secularism against the oppression of organized religion — in this case, extreme Islam.
Rousseau’s “general will” — which must direct the state — triumphs over the rights and freedom of the individual that Voltaire would defend. (Rousseau saw rights as derived from society, meaning that an individual could not have rights against that society.) So we can cast these beach-town mayors as followers of the arch-Rousseauist Robespierre, whose Jacobin reign of terror sought ideological purity, weeding out the moral laxity of the Girondins.
However, in doing so we ready ourselves for opponents of the burqa and burkini to proclaim themselves as defenders of tolerance — they see the burkini as a garment of oppression. The town mayor is defending the rights of the individual against an oppressive and misogynist religious code. According to this line of reasoning, the post-Enlightenment duty of the state is to stand up for secularism against the oppression of organized religion — in this case, extreme Islam.
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To those less ready to wallow in French Revolutionary role-play — and therefore to many Anglo-Saxon outsiders — a burkini ban seems out of all proportion to the problem. The outsiders question whether a ban is worth the controversy, speculating that its proclamation risks stirring up as much resentment as its enforcement is supposed to defuse.
However, to many people in France, the principle of laicity has to be defended as a central plank of the Republic. Jacques Chirac, when president of France, described “la laïcité” as “non-negotiable.” In 2004 France passed a law banning the wearing of “ostensible religious insignia” in state schools. In 2009, the debate was extended to the wearing of religious clothing in public and in 2010 the wearing in public of the veiled burqa was outlawed. During the debate over this law, President Nicolas Sarkozy argued that the fully-veiled burqa (as distinct from the niqab, which does not cover the eyes) was not religious clothing but a cultural practice. He said that, while the principle of laicity entailed respect for all religions, it did not imply unlimited tolerance of different cultures.
Muslim women hold a banner which says “a Choice” as they demonstrated against the French proposal to bar Muslim women from wearing headscarves in state school | Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
In Germany, Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister, couches a possible restriction on wearing a burqa as a security matter — suggesting a requirement “to show one’s face in places where it is necessary for our society’s coexistence.” In a television interview he argued that burqas did not belong “in our cosmopolitan country,” but his opposition sounds more pragmatic and less ideological than that voiced in France
What makes enforcement of laicity highly problematic in France, however, is that the context from which it grew has changed. The secularism of the French state was established as a counter-weight to the power of the Roman Catholic Church, whose priests and churches and schools were present throughout the French Republic, and was shaped by the 18th and 19th century battles between the Enlightenment and the Vatican.
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The laicity of the French state was in part a reaction to the errors of earlier persecutions and discrimination and was largely defined by the Catholic church that it was supposed to constrain, as well as by the cultes of Protestantism and Judaism to which it also gave space.
But with the Catholic church receding into the background, the laicity of the French state is less clearly defined. That creates a two-fold problem for French politicians seeking to preserve the secularism that they regard as an essential characteristic of modern France.
The first is that, with the Catholic church no longer the dominant force that it was, laicity may look like thinly disguised anti-Islamicism, officially endorsed. The secular authorities, it seems, are coming to the aid of the enfeebled western religions to counter the insurgent Islam.
The second is that laicity becomes so closely identified with the state that it takes on a nationalist, even chauvinist, hue: If secularism is essential to French identity, then, by contrast, what is not secular is by definition anti-French.
The quest for secular purity is probably misguided
That was a much more difficult elision to make when the main clerical force was the Catholic church, which was undeniably part of the fabric of the country. To take what one would have to describe as a telling example: One of the flash-points of clerical and anti-clerical tension in the 19th century was whether the village bells should be rung to mark the death of someone who was not a communicant member of the church. There are records of anti-clerical mayors going to court to get the bells rung, and even sending in the local guard to force down the doors of the church bell-tower.
The defensive reversion to patriotism has a long pedigree. Historians of the French Revolution have charted the journey from the universalism of the early Revolution to the patriotism of the Revolutionary Wars: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, in which the French citizen was a citizen of the world, gave way to an altogether more bloody and patriotic revolution.
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Those early aspirations to universalism were never quite reconciled with subsequent French rulers’ desire for conformity. In the 20th century, French governments scorned the (controversial) multiculturalism of the Anglo-Saxon world even while the country’s population became more ethnically diverse. The state was blind to their differences. In practice, that meant belittling or even denying social problems that have latterly provided fertile ground for extremism. Arguably, the policy of laicity in state schools has hardened as the Muslim population has increased.
The beneficiary of all this ideological confusion has arguably been the far-right – latterly the National Front led by Marine Le Pen. Just as her electoral threat forced Sarkozy’s center-right governments to take a hard line on the burqa, so it forces François Hollande’s governments to cling to secularism as an article of Socialist faith (things were simpler in the days of opposing the Catholic bishops).
The quest for secular purity is probably misguided. After all, the French state made a series of accommodations with the Roman Catholic Church. The Emperor Napoleon (Corsican-born) made peace with Pope Leo XII, offering compensation for the appropriation of church property in an 1801 concordat that held sway for a century. And its replacement – a 1905 law that guarantees the separation of church and state – was itself modified and attenuated in subsequent years. French secularism has ebbed and flowed over the years. Even Rousseau recognized that political institutions must adapt to their circumstances. And Voltaire, who was a great admirer of the English, would have recognized the need for some Anglo-Saxon pragmatism.
Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.