Passionate subjects
A basic assumption underlying the Stasi report is that signification is a rational process which offers a translucent window onto reality. But the idea of translucence is continually undermined by passionate constructions that blur the line between subject and object.

In an important book entitled La nouvelle islamophobie, Vincent Geisser documents the growing tide of hostility towards Muslims and Arabs in France today and recounts the many public statements and actions that have sought to connect this population with concerns about national security. According to Geisser and others, dislike of Muslims and Islam has roots in a bitter colonial history—especially its troubled relations with Algeria—which is kept alive by a million colonial settlers who returned to France after its independence. This public attitude is now reinforced by a new concern about international terrorism. Yet in the nineteenth century a long line of French writers and travelers (including Nerval, Lamartine, Flaubert) depicted Arabs and Muslims sympathetically—reflecting as they did so, nostalgia for a world being ravaged by modernity. The passions involved then and now should not, therefore, be seen as a simple product of enmity. The sensibilities they express are (as in the colonial past) sometimes fragile and contradictory. But even when they are not unfriendly, they usually respond to the emotional demands of particular Frenchmen and Frenchwomen rather than to those of their Muslim fellow-citizens.

In a book that appeared a year earlier,19 Daniel Lindenberg (professor of political science at the University of Paris VIII) maintains that this wave of Islamophobia is part of a wider reactionary movement that has acquired new force and includes hostility to mass culture, human rights, and antiracism. Popular writers like Michel Houellebecq and Oriana Fallacci (an Italian journalist but widely read in France) attack Muslims and Arabs in language very reminiscent of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic obsessions in Bagatelles pour un massacre. On the other hand respectable Catholic intellectuals such as Alain Besançon and Pierre Manent too are able to get a sympathetic audience for their anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant sentiment.20

One aspect of this sentiment is evident in the way public talk about attitudes towards Muslims has become entangled with public concern over anti-semitism. In spite of the long history of anti-semitism in modern France (a history not entirely closed) animosity towards Muslims is now more pervasive than towards any other religious or ethnic group.21 Put another way: Anyone who wants to be taken seriously in public life cannot afford to be known as an anti-semite—even the National Front now attempts to avoid appearing anti-semitic in public—but the same cannot be said of people hostile to Islam.22 (Even the common claim that political criticism of the state of Israel is often a mask for anti-semitism acknowledges in effect that that prejudice needs to be hidden when expressed publicly.23) In contrast, there are many prominent intellectuals in France who publicly express opinions Muslims find offensive, and yet these intellectuals remain highly respected.24 Acts and statements offensive to Jews, on the other hand, issue largely from sections of the population that are already far from respectable: extreme right-wing elements (neo-Nazis) or Muslim youth in the “sensitive” banlieus. (It need hardly be stressed that the neo-Nazis are no friends to Muslims either.) Sometimes the anti-Jewish acts of young Muslims are explained in the media as a consequence of their identification with Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation or of the social exclusion and economic disadvantage suffered by young Muslims in contemporary France, but invariably such explanations are denounced by many in the media as tantamount to “excusing criminal violence,” and blame is placed instead on Muslim clerics whose views on the subject are held to constitute hateful indoctrination.25

The complicated emotional relationship of many French Jews with the Israeli state is too sensitive a subject for most non-Jewish public commentators to deal with publicly. A thoughtful piece entitled “The Jews of France, Zionists without Zionism”26 has been written recently by Esther Benbassa (professor of the history of modern Judaism at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes) which underlines the tension between the passionate attachment of French Jews to the state of Israel and the ideological claim by the latter that all Jews belong in Israel, in “their own state.”27 What is missing in this account is a discussion of the implications this tension has for the relations of French Jews with French Muslims, for both of whom political identity is at once local and transnational. This omission does not merely concern the sources of friction between Jews and Muslims in France however; it concerns the problematic character of the idea—on which laïcité is premised—that secular citizens are committed to an exclusive culture and a single nation state to which there corresponds a public sphere. The fact that citizens inhabit several public spheres that overlap and extend laterally and do not coincide with national boundaries produces difficulties for the modern secular state.

However anti-semitism may be defined and explained, it is taken more seriously by French politicians,28 public intellectuals, and activists than parallel expressions of prejudice against Muslims.29 This asymmetry is due to a general recognition that anti-semitism has been the cause of far greater cruelty in modern Europe than anything perpetrated by anti-Arab racism or by anti-Islamic phobias. That judgment is correct, of course. The systematic attempt to eliminate Jews (and gypsies and homosexuals) in the modern nation state is without parallel. Of course there was French cruelty perpetrated in Algeria, stretching from the destroyed villages, orchards, wells and fields during its nineteenth-century conquest (the modern strategy of total war was invented by French generals in their conquest of Algeria) to the torture chambers in the Battle of Algiers (modern techniques of counter-insurgency were developed by the French there and then passed on to Latin America and the U.S.). But then all that cruelty was outside France and perpetrated against non-Europeans.

Be that as it may, the shame-faced awareness on the part of many French that they themselves participated in the historic cruelty against the Jews during World War II encourages not only their calling publicly for exceptional vigilance against anti-semitism but also their denouncing with exceptional fervor any incident that might be called anti-semitic. These are indications of a hope that a nation’s virtue once lost can be reclaimed, that the moral damage done to itself can finally be repaired. At any rate, the attempt by many intellectuals and much of the media to shift the entire question of “anti-semitism” to “the social danger of Islamism” in France has the comforting effect of diverting attention away from the historical prejudice against Jews in the Republic and away from the more general problem of unity in a modern secular state.

In an interesting book on the symbolic role of the Holocaust in France, Joan Wolf has shown how the meaning of that event for Jews has been appropriated by diverse groups for their own discursive purposes. “After the 1990 desecration of a Jewish cemetery at Carpentras,” she writes, “the nation denounced the ‘fascist’ Le Pen in a narrative that was tantamount to a repudiation of Vichy and an identification with its Jewish victims, and the Holocaust came to stand for the suffering and innocence of the French people at the hands of the evil and guilty Vichy regime.”30 Wolf is right to point to the gap between the Jewish experience of trauma and the French political rhetoric of victimhood under the Vichy regime. But also worth noting is the symbolic dependence of a morally restored France on a public recognition of Jewish suffering. This linkage carries its own emotional charge, one that substitutes “Islamic fundamentalism” for Vichy’s ideological anti-semitism, and thereby promotes a public distrust of French Muslims whose access to the media is accordingly affected.

This web of emotions indicates how fraught the very idea of neutrality is in the domain of public opinion. Guilt, contempt, resentment, virtuous outrage, slyness, pride, comfort, all intersect in complicated ways in the secular Republic’s public sphere and inform attitudes towards its religiously or ethnically stigmatized citizens. Laïcité is not blind to religiously identified groups in public. It is suspicious of some (Muslims) because of what it imagines they may do, and it is ashamed when confronting others (Jews) because of what they have suffered at the hands of Frenchmen. The desire to keep some groups under surveillance and to be seen making amends to others—and thus of coming honorably to terms with one’s own past, of re-affirming France—are both integral to the French public sphere.

Of course there is criminal activity among young Muslims who live in the “sensitive” banlieus, and patriarchal attitudes characterize most Muslim immigrants. But neither crime nor patriarchy is foreign to French society. Interpreters of laïcité who object to French Muslims on these grounds do not ask themselves what makes transgression of the law and patriarchal relations defining features of a specific “culture.” It is true that the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as well as the increasing prominence of Islamic militancy in many parts of the Muslim world, have angered many secularists in France. But it is unclear just how these things have come to be construed as a threat to the foundational values of the secular Republic.

I want to end with some comments on a television program broadcast a month before the National Assembly passed the law banning the veil. In January 2004, France 2’s Cent minutes pour convaincre, took up the theme of “The Republic, religion, and secularism.” Many public personalities—including Bernard Stasi himself—were present, and most of the discussion (and all the documentary clips shown) revolved around the theme of Muslim patriarchy—including such customs as arranged marriages, virginity certificates, etc.—of which the Islamic veil was a symbol.31 It was not how young women wearing the headscarf lived that mattered but what “the veil” signified.

But in the verbal attack on Muslim patriarchal customs important questions about the character of Republican secularism escaped attention. How can one reconcile the liberty to express individual religious belief with the duty to obey the law of the Republic? In what way is the principle of abstract equality applicable to subjects embedded in overlapping communities? What does fraternity mean among citizens and towards immigrants (for example Maghrebin working-class immigrants as opposed to middle-class immigrants from Britain)? The dominant assumption seemed to be that thanks to the Republic’s Revolutionary origin the political form of secular society was already in place and that what was called for was its recognition as a particular set of signs and its defense against other signs.

In spite of the fact that several well-known reasons could be adduced for re-thinking laïcité, they were not taken up. What are these reasons? First, there is the large inflow of formerly colonized Muslims many of whom are not French nationals even though they live, work and pay taxes in France. Many state positions (surgeons, for example) are legally closed to foreigners but they are employed unofficially, paid much less and have no job security. Everyone who lives in France is not equal before the law. Second, elements of national autonomy are being ceded to the European Union, undermined by the exigencies of a global economy, and information concerning taxation, subsidies, and fiscal policies generally are virtually inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Third, the recent migration of peoples (including large numbers of Jews and then of Muslims from North Africa) and the circulation of electronic images make for the direction of fears, longings, resentments towards peoples and places beyond the neat boundaries of the sovereign Republic—and even of the European Union. All these processes decrease the individual’s command of the knowledge needed to assess her own moral and political actions, making the very idea of the citizen as morally and politically sovereign a problematic one and the Republic’s project of creating secular subjects through national education extremely uncertain at best.

The TV show didn’t regard any of this to be relevant to its conversation. It was a popular replay of the semi-governmental Stasi commission of inquiry. The public intellectuals appeared to regard themselves as presenting public opinion to the Republic that was about to debate a law fundamental to the defense of laïcité. In doing so, they were restoring an eighteenth-century French conception of the public sphere as an institution of governance—as a space of publicity that connected a well-governed people to its just legislator in a hierarchical manner.