The Muslim Headscarf and French schools Author- Harry Judge

The Muslim Headscarf and French SchoolsAuthor(s): Harry JudgeSource: American Journal of Education, Vol. 111, No. 1 (Nov., 2004), pp. 1-24Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3566880Accessed: 20/02/2010 06:30

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The Muslim Headscarf and French Schools

HARRY JUDGE University of Oxford

The particular circumstances of French history explain why that nation has adopted an unusually severe policy in attempting to suppress the wearing in schools of the Muslim headscarf. The long struggle to create French identity and then to resolve the bitter conflicts between traditional supporters of the Catholic Church and those of the secular Republic resulted in a distinctive connotation being acquired by a number of commonly used words, of which most English translations are misleadingly inadequate. The events leading from the exclusion of three Muslim girls from a school in 1998 to the passing of the new law of 2004 are analyzed.

The Identity of France

In 1996 a much-traveled pope embarked upon an official visit to France to celebrate the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, who in

popular and pious ideology is honored as the true founder of that remarkable nation. President Chirac, a center-right president then governing uncomfort-

ably alongside a Socialist prime minister, proposed to honor the event with his presence. But even so astute a politician had not realized just what a storm this apparently harmless gesture would raise (Berge 1996). In the eyes of the

outraged critics of the president, his official presence would be worse than an act of apostasy: the head of the Republic-one and indivisible and above all

laique (a word for the moment left untranslated)-was presuming to endorse a deeply contested definition of French identity, one which the Revolution and two centuries of bitter wrangling had successfully challenged.1 Earnest

anticlericals, resentful of being statistically counted as Catholics simply because

they had been baptized in early infancy, lined up in provincial cities to sign certificates of debaptism. It was a scene that Voltaire would have appreciated. The president discreetly withdrew: politics, religion, and French identity re-

American Journal of Education 111 (November 2004) ? 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0195-6744/2004/11101-0001$05.00

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Muslim Headscarf and French Schools

mained, as they always had been, inseparable and entangled (Braudel 1986; Tallett and Atkin 1991).

On February 10, 2004, the National Assembly approved, by 494 votes to 36 with 31 abstentions, the first reading of a brief law that prohibited (after September 2004) the wearing by pupils in any public school of any conspicuous sign of religious affiliation (Assemblee Nationale 2004). This draconian measure often puzzles, and sometimes offends, liberal opinion abroad-and especially in what the French themselves quaintly describe as the Anglo-Saxon countries. Why, it is asked, should a nation that ranks so high among the champions of individual liberty and human rights think it necessary or even wise to be so proscriptive? And, even more curiously, why has the measure received so much support across so wide a spectrum of public and political opinion? This article proposes to address those two puzzles, and to do so in terms that represent an effort by an Englishman to explain to Americans why the French are as the French are.2

Americans, who are well enough aware of the conflicts and contradictions that led to the creation of their own nation, are nevertheless predisposed (as are many British) to regard "France" as a given, as a natural and inevitable product of geography, ethnicity, and language, and therefore to conclude that the hexagonal nation simply emerged from medieval mists without pain and without fuss. Nothing of course could be further from the truth: if history had followed that imagined path, there would be no great commotion today about whether Muslim schoolgirls may or may not cover their hair. This is why it is necessary to begin with Clovis. France was created by conflict, by war and the suppression of alternative identities (think only of Brittany or the Lan- guedoc, where regional languages and cultures had been systematically weak-

ened). The successors of Clovis created France, by expanding aggressively from their heartland around Paris, by expelling the intrusive English, by im-

posing formal suzerainty and eliminating feudal rivals. Eventually it became plausible to assert that the natural frontiers of "France" were the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. In that prolonged expansion the Catholic Church became an indispensable ally: the extinction of the Cathars in southwest France was only the most notable of many examples of the alliance of the two powers. Catholic orthodoxy and state centralization, in however rudimentary a form,

HARRY JUDGE was from 1973 to 1988 the director of the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, where he remains a Fellow of Brasenose College. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in the United States, where most of his work and publications have been concerned with teacher education policy. His more recent writings have been comparative studies of the public funding of religiously affiliated schools in France, the United States, and England.

2 American Journal of Education

Judge

were mutually reinforcing aspects of the same unifying development. So was the imposition, sometimes ruthless, of one law and one language: in 1539 Francis I by edict made French and not Latin the official legal language. Une loi, unefoi, un roi was the founding axiom of a unified francophone France, in which Protestants, for example, could be only fleetingly and uncomfortably accommodated. Louis XIV-who systematized the government of his extended dominions, banished the Protestants, and championed the arts and

(French) literature-remains the dominant symbol of France as a great political and cultural power. (No modern state has devoted so much money and effort to promoting its own language and projecting its own prestigious image.)

The creation of France therefore represents an act of will, not a fact of nature. In that process the indivisibility of France becomes a dogma, even if its practical implications are changed profoundly by such upheavals as the Revolution of 1789. That revolution may have nationalized the church, but it was still the church of the nation (Ravitch 1990). Even when that domesticated church was temporarily abolished, the state promptly substituted the worship of the supreme being and a new national calendar (Vovelle 1976). When

Napoleon, as the administrative heir of the revolutionary but centralizing Jacobins, wished to reimpose unity and uniformity, he signed in 1801 a concordat with Rome ensuring that the French church remained distinctively French as well as traditionally orthodox in doctrine and defining Catholicism as the religion of "the majority of Frenchmen" (although, a modest concession, no longer as "the religion of France"). The official church was certainly Cath- olic without being excessively Roman (that is to say, foreign or ultramontane). Napoleon reaffirmed a strong "Gallican" tradition, celebrating that same spec- ificity and autonomy of the French church that Francis I (the very king who had made the French language supreme) had endorsed three centuries before. All the Catholic clergy were to be paid salaries by the state and their churches maintained by it. The national administration of the nineteenth-century Cath- olic Church, leaving some modest space within the law for Protestants and

Jews, was entirely consistent with the rule of Paris throughout the provinces- through its powerful agents, the prefects-and the management of the com-

manding heights of the educational system through that equally remarkable

institution, the University of France (Basdevant-Gaudemert 1988). The Napoleonic empire itself may have been short-lived, but its institutions

proved both durable and resilient. They survived as, over the next hundred

years, the pendulum of power rocked back and forth between monarchies and republics, Catholics and anticlericals, between what came to be well characterized as "the two Frances" (Mauduit 1984; Poulat 1987). Yet what united the two Frances was more important than what divided them: they agreed that one ideology had to dominate, that peaceful coexistence (of the kind a pragmatic Napoleon might have favored) was impossible because it

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implied partition and segmentation-and France must remain one and indivisible. If either ultramontanes or Freemasons had known the words "pluralism" and "multiculturalism" they would have hated them.

The Napoleonic equilibrium proved unstable as powerful and opposing forces in the society continued to battle for the control of the national identity. The restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815 led within a few years to a sharp tilt toward an exaggerated form of Clovisism: the coronation of Charles X in the cathedral at Reims was a spectacular demonstration of the resuscitation of a France that was more medieval than the Middle Ages themselves. Within a decade it was followed by the Revolution of 1830 and an Orleanist monarchy, with a king who is remembered for his umbrella rather than his sceptre. His able minister, Guizot-Protestant, Anglophile, and enlightened diluted the influence of the Catholic establishment on education by laying solid foun- dations for a system of elementary schooling and of teacher training that would furnish a viable alternative to a clerical monopoly (Nique 1990). Guizot had more in common with Montesquieu than withJoan of Arc. This moderate

bourgeois regime was terminated by a tentative lurch toward the Catholic

right after the restoration of a Bonaparte as emperor. Secondary education was reopened to the Catholics and the monopoly of the secular University of France successfully challenged: the Falloux Law (1850) was to reappear at the center of educational argument in the last decade of the twentieth

century (Judge 2002). The collapse of the Second Empire in 1870 was followed, after a short period of uncertainty, by an emphatic return to the authentic, if still uncertain, Republican tradition. France, while remaining a

deeply Catholic and religiously observant society, was to be ruled according to the principles of secularity (a provisional and inadequate English version of laicisme) and of neutrality. Citizenship was to be open to all loyal Frenchmen, regardless of religious preference or affiliation. Specifically, public elementary schooling became compulsory and free, with all its teachers lay (and not

clerical), trained in state normal schools, and systematically imbued with authentic Republican principles.Jules Ferry, the author of many of these reforms, became and remains a hero of the laique movement. Anticlericalism, but not religion, was famously declared to be the enemy (Gaillard 1989; Remond 1985).

The conflict between a traditionalist monarchical right (rooted in the Cath- olic Church and the army) and a bourgeois Republican left (linked to Free-

masonry and liberal Protestantism) reached a climax in one of the most dra- matic series of events in French history: the Dreyfus case (Brodin 1994; Cahm 1994). All the most naked prejudices and conflicting principles boiled to the surface, and as a consequence the Napoleonic settlement was legally terminated. A 1905 law decisively separated the churches from the state (or that at least was its intention), ending the payment of the clergy by the state and


Judge

handing over churches and other religious buildings-since the Revolution, effectively state property-to legally constituted religious associations, the associations cultuelles (Larkin 1974; Merle 1991). On the surface, although not far beneath it, such a settlement closely resembled the prohibition of an establishment of religion enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Consti- tution. The central principle was that no religion should receive official state recognition, and none should receive support from public funds. A naive

reading of history might therefore suggest that when a "new" religion was later introduced on a major scale into France (alongside Catholicism, two forms of Protestantism, and Judaism) there would be no major difficulties, at least in law and financing, in accommodating and integrating the new arrival. Unfortunately, the "settlement" of 1905 was by no means as final or as geo- metrically clear as the textbooks misleadingly pretend.

The French State and Religion

Nothing is ever quite so clear in French practice as it in theory appears to be: like the language itself, principles may be clear (ce qui n'est pas clair n'estpas franfais), but the French have an admirable and necessary talent for adapting such precision to the untidiness of everyday life. The 1905 law could not in truth be immediately and ruthlessly applied: confronted with physical resistance by Catholics, the hardheaded Clemenceau resolved that counting chan- deliers (for the law required the prefects to draw up detailed inventories of all church property) was not worth the life of a single Frenchman. Recalcitrant Catholics refused to hand over their property and their duties to newfangled associations, insisting that canonical authority must rest with the bishops and the hierarchy. The government waited until 1924 to arrive at some settlement and then accepted that subsidies would still be provided to repair and maintain Catholic churches built before 1905. Ingenious compromises were arrived at to regulate the use of church bells, important as village timekeepers and emergency signals (Corbin 1998). Of the present fifteen official public holidays in the self-styled secular Republic, six are related to Christian festivals, one of them to the ultra-Catholic feast of the Assumption on August 15. When the Ferry laws had been introduced in the 1880s, one day a week was set aside for religious education, to be provided out of school by a minister of the appropriate denomination: this concession survives today in some trun- cated form. The laws were never applied fully in dependent overseas territories, even when some of those territories were classified as an integral part of an undivided Republic. When Alsace-Lorraine was recovered by France in 1918, after nearly fifty resented years of German occupation, the 1905 law was not, and never has been, applied, and the terms of the concordat of 1801 are

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therefore still in force there (Schlick 1975). Throughout France, chaplaincies, for the most part Catholic, have always been preserved with state funding in

prisons, hospitals, the army, and, especially, public schools (Bourdoncle and Moitel 1978; Swerry 1995). All these adjustments or anomalies were preserved even in the heated anticlerical atmosphere of 1905 and were significantly reinforced in the second half of the century when copious state funding was extended to faith-based (and overwhelmingly Catholic) schools. The 1905 law

may have changed much, but Catholic power remained a reality, perceived as an ever-present threat to the purity of Republican belief (Poulat 1987).

Such fears of Catholic power were nourished, and to some extent justified, by the bitter experience of the Vichy years (Paxton 1970). This short and

painful period, until recently regarded as an aberration from rather than an

integral part of the history of France, encouraged a resurgence of reactionary and intermittently Catholic sentiment and legislation: normal schools, as sem- inaries of atheist and radical republicanism, were abolished; Jews were excluded from teaching; subsidies were provided for Catholic schools, many of them now in serious financial difficulty (Atkin 1991; Halls 1981; Handourtzel

1997). It was as a postwar reaction against such measures that the new constitution adopted in 1945 explicitly and for the first time a definition of the

Republic as being laique in character, without saying precisely what that meant. This short-lived Republic (the Fourth) came to an abrupt end with the Algerian war, which led to a large-scale immigration into mainland France of Muslims from North Africa, as well as of displaced French citizens fearful of the effects of independence. This crisis led directly to the formation of the Fifth Republic (Gildea 1996, p. 43; Guillaume 1989). Although this Republic was formally as lai4ue as its predecessor, and so advertised itself in the preamble to the new constitution, General de Gaulle had other and more immediate preoccupa- tions. His determination, in the cause of restoring French greatness and prosperity, to preside over a massive expansion of educational provision obliged him to find some way of mobilizing in the service of such an expansion the resources of the financially embarrassed Catholic schools. Against ferocious

opposition Michel Debre, his prime minister who was acting also as the minister of national education, rammed through legislation that achieved precisely that goal. Voluntary religious schools, the great majority of which were of course Catholic, were given the opportunity of entering into unprecedented contracts, on a school-by-school basis, with the state (Judge 2002, p. 149). Such schools were allowed to preserve their distinctive character (the much debated caractere propre) provided that they opened their doors to students of all religious affiliations or of none, submitted to inspection, and agreed to follow all the national educational programs. In return they received copious infusions of public funds. Massive petitions and protests were mounted against what were denounced as a fundamental violation of the letter and the spirit


Judge

of the law of 1905 and as a frontal attack on the secular sanctity of the school of Jules Ferry. Such disputes were reignited in both 1984 and 1994 when

attempts were made to revise the terms of the Debre law-in the first case to make it less generous to the Catholics and in the second to make it more so-and illuminate contemporary Muslim dissatisfaction with the treatment of their own faith by the French state. No Muslim school in metropolitan France, and only one in its overseas territories, has yet received comparable financial or legal treatment.

The Gaullist coup of 1958 led not only to this fundamental mutation in the relationship between public funding and religious schools but also marked the end of the bitterly fought war in Algeria. The French-born settlers-the so called pieds noirs, over one million of whom returned to France-were

unlikely to be welcoming in their attitude toward other, very different migrants from North Africa, and they fortified a prejudice that being French meant

being French in the sense thatJean-Marie le Pen, the controversial leader of the National Front, was later ruthlessly to exploit. Many of these new im-

migrants, especially in the early waves, were harkis-North Africans loyal to the French power, fearful of staying at home, and bitterly resentful of the ambivalent welcome they received in the France they had served. Over the

years, the numbers of other immigrants multiplied as prosperity attracted (as in many European countries) impoverished immigrants from the Maghreb and other African regions. Of these many had, again as in several other

European examples, not intended to settle permanently but did. (Bernard 2004; Bouamana 1994). The cultural distance between them and the classical, neutral public school of Ferry-the "School of the Republic"-proved hard to bridge (Benbessa 2004; Berque 1985). As a result of successive waves of

immigration, Islam is now in numerical terms the second religion of France, and (if the regular practice of religion is regarded as even more relevant than census estimates) probably "the first."

Some estimates of the number of Muslims in France today approach the five million mark, but the most careful and recent analysis yields a nevertheless remarkable total of 3.65 million (Keppel 1991; Zarka 2004). Equally striking is the heavy concentration of Muslims in socially disadvantaged areas: in some banlieues (for which "suburbs" is a dangerously misleading translation) the concentration of poor immigrants rises as high as 80 percent. Many of them live in unappealing cites, typically in tower blocks that the police are sometimes forced to treat as no-go areas. Muslims constitute 50 percent of the prison population (Le Monde de l'Education, April 2004). A comparable imbalance is reflected in the statistics of unemployment. Such figures, readily matched in the United States and especially in Britain, underline the crude and cruel sociological fact that immigrant communities are concentrated in deprived areas, where both the cycle of disadvantage and a widespread sense of griev-

NOVEMBER 2004 7


ance and frustration are reinforced. Sympathetic observers have commented on the poor quality of the leadership available to Muslims. Ninety percent of imams in France are trained abroad (if at all), and much of the money for the support of Muslim communities and their more expensive and visible

mosques comes from Saudi Arabia. Nor do Muslims share the real advantages (freely enjoyed by Catholics, Jews, and Protestants as well as by other smaller and more recently significant groups, including Buddhists) of adequate forms of organization and representation (Etienne 1989, 1991). This deficiency, related only in part to the diverse and nonhierarchical character of Islam, mag- nifies the problems of establishing effective contact with and support from

government agencies of many kinds, including educational ones. The im-

pressive building in the capital (La Grande Mosquee de Paris) is itself an

exception that in many ways proves the rule. Currently presided over as recteur

by the moderate and influential Dalil Boubakeur, it was established in the 1920s with government support and funding and in part as a recognition of the contribution made in World War I by loyal troops from North Africa. But its authority is regularly challenged by other mosques and their local leaders. Serious official attempts have been made to provide some forum in which Muslim opinion could be shaped and articulated: the 1990 Conseil de Re- flexion sur l'Islam en France (CRIF) proved to be no more than a talking shop. Other groups have proved, in some cases deliberately, to be divisive rather than unifying: the Union des Organisations Islamiques en France

(UOIF) is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood while the Federation Na- tionale des Musulmans de France (FNMF) has strong links to Morocco. More

recently the active (many critics would prefer hyperactive) Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy established the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman

(CFCM) to serve as an official intermediary between Islam and the state: its

early elections gave most representation to groups regarded as tending toward an extremist position. While it is obviously too early to form a view of CFCM's effectiveness, it did prove to be uneasy and divided in its reaction to the

problem with which this article is centrally concerned, namely, the new law of 2004.

The Headscarf

In 1989 three girls were excluded from the local college (the lower secondary or junior high school in the French system) in Creil, a town of some thirty thousand inhabitants, forty miles to the east of Paris (Altschull 1995). The principal-who later became a member of parliament for the party to which Chirac belonged-alleged that they had persistently attempted to come to school, and to attend classes, wearing a Muslim headscarf (the foulard or hiab).


Judge

This he regarded as a violation of the principle that the French public school was an uncompromisingly secular (or laique) institution. All students must have free access on terms of absolute equality to all the resources of the school and take part in all its educational programs. This is what egalite meant. For the many defenders of L'Ecole de la Republique who hastened into print to reinforce such arguments, any substantial concession in such a matter would call into

question all that had been achieved by the historic defeat of a clerical monopoly, by the separation (in the interest of both institutions, it could now be

claimed) of church and state, by the Ferry laws and all that had flowed from them. For many such critics the Debre law itself had of course been a dan-

gerous aberration (as they had recently demonstrated in 1984 by an attempt to limit its effects). The religious beliefs of school students, while enjoying the full protection of the law, remained a purely private matter, of no concern to the school or to any public authority. It is clear that, as in many similar cases that arose over the next decade, activist Islamic groups had, from whatever motives, to some extent engineered or magnified this confrontation: the issue had not previously surfaced in the public domain. The Koran (e.g., 24:30-31 or 33:59) required only that women and girls should be modestly dressed and covered, and such injunctions had been interpreted in significantly differing ways in various Islamic cultures. The headscarf now in France became for the first time an issue related to identity, and (in the eyes of its critics) toleration of its wearing in schools represented an unacceptable subordination of women. Unsurprisingly, the media were now fully alert to the confrontation in Creil and all that followed it (Debray 2004).

An easy and informal accommodation had long since been reached with Catholic students who chose to wear an unobtrusive crucifix, as with the smaller number of Jews who chose to adopt distinctive but discreet forms of dress, notably the skullcap or kippa. On the other hand, the state and the law had never conceded any general right of members of the Jewish community to absent themselves from school on Saturday mornings, when many lycees (senior high schools) are regularly in session. The duty of regular attendance at a public institution takes precedence over any private rights derived from a religious or cultural affiliation. But it was unlikely to prove so simple to extend implicit and superficially modest concessions to a community that was large in number (and in that sense threatening to a French sense of identity), visibly "different," resentful and discontented, and supported by well-orches- trated groups of activists presenting themselves at the school gates. More than symbolic habits of dress were involved. In many of the cases that now arose, students (or their parents and others acting in their name) refused to take part in physical education, demanded separate provision for the two sexes for swimming lessons, found the teaching of music unacceptable, and objected to many specific elements in the general curriculum. The teaching of human

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reproductive biology was found objectionable. Montaigne, Moliere, Voltaire, and many other heroes of French culture were denounced as dangerous her- etics. The daily discipline of the school, deeply valued elements in a distinctive French national culture and the hard-won values of the Republic-all seemed to be directly challenged. Many teachers, bred in those pervasive traditions and values and who themselves were formally committed to observing an absolute neutrality in their own professional conduct, were especially incensed

(Le Monde de l'Education, January 2004). The unions took up the cudgels. Some, but by no means all, feminists injected further controversy into an already seething dispute by identifying the headscarf issue with an exploitation and domination of vulnerable Muslim girls and young women by aggressive males. The exclusion of the offending students now raised more problems than it had attempted to solve (Gaspard and Khosrokhvar 1995).

LionelJospin, minister of education during the presidency of Francois Mit-

terrand, temporized by referring the matter to the Conseil d'Etat, the highest administrative court. In November 1989 it produced a closely argued opinion that carefully balanced two principles. The first guaranteed the freedom of conscience of the student, which public law must never invade. Students must be free to hold and to express their own opinions, preferences, and loyalties, and this guaranteed freedom must embrace the right to such expression not

only of speech but also in dress or symbols. That freedom is not, of course,

enjoyed by teachers and other public servants for, as agents of a laique Republic, they must be and be seen to be scrupulously neutral. (History echoes throughout this debate: a public school student may not be taught by a cleric wearing a cassock or by a Catholic sister in her habit.) A second principle required, however, that no such expression of belief may disturb the orderly conduct

of a school or any other public institution, affect the duty of each student to

be assiduous in attendance and participate fully in all the normal work of the

school, or constitute an act of pressure or proselytization. Two of the founding

principles of the Republic-liberte and egalit--had always to be carefully balanced. Successive official circulars of the Ministry of Education, culminating in that promulgated in 1994 by the center-right Francois Bayrou, emphasized the importance of resolving each conflict on a case-by-case basis and endorsed

disapproval of the wearing of any dress or symbol that might be ostentatoire, or ostentatious (Conseil d'Etat 2004, pp. 338-42). But that term of course itself implies a deliberate but arguable intent, and it proved administratively and legally treacherous to distinguish between what was ostentatious and that which was merely conspicuous. Even the nose of Cyrano de Bergerac could not properly be described as ostentatious, although conspicuous it undoubtedly was. Administrative decisions could be, and were, challenged at every point. Wearing a headscarf was clearly not in itself a disruption of the serenity of the school: but if it led to noisy demonstrations, what then? Swimming may


Judge

indeed be part of the national curriculum, but did that render inadmissible a request for separate times for swimming for the two sexes? If a headscarf

(never very precisely defined) was unacceptable, what about a bandanna? If it was wrong to teach the catechism in public schools, why was it right to "teach" Voltaire or contested doctrines of evolution? If it was acceptable for one student to wear the hgab, why was it wrong for twenty or one hundred to do so? If other students could wear a crucifix or a kippa, on what basis could such concessions then be denied to French citizens who were Muslims

(Vianes 2004)? It is therefore hardly surprising if the jurisprudence that across the next

decade emerged from the lower administrative courts and even from the Conseil d'Etat itself proved to be complex, tentative, and sometimes contra-

dictory. It was the responsibility of the school, of its principal and its duly appointed council, to make and apply clear local regulations, within the general framework of the laws of the Republic, and then to apply any appropriate sanctions, including exclusion. It soon became plain that any general regulation simply banning the wearing of the hyab would be reversed by the competent courts. The precedents were thought to be clear.Just as any general concession to Jewish students excusing them from attending school on Saturday could never be allowed (although individual concessions in appropriate circumstances might be), so too would any general prohibition of the wearing of

religious symbols be illegal, while school regulations requiring orderly conduct, assiduity in attendance, and abstention from any form of proselytization would be upheld on appeal to the courts. "Liberty" in the French sense protected individual rights. "Equality" ensured that all students be treated in the same manner and have access to the same resources and opportunities. But neither hallowed principle, as articulated in the classical French provision as it has evolved since 1789, allows any space for the rights or privileges of groups. In France there can be as many differing individuals as there are citizens-but

only one community, the Republic, one and indivisible. Those directly responsible for the daily management of secondary schools,

the proviseurs in the lycees and the principals in the colleges, would not find it

simple to follow such uncharacteristically general guidance from the center and naturally resented the burden now thrust upon them. Many argued against the doctrine that rules should be interpreted in the light of local circumstances, insisting that rules should, in the authentic French tradition, be both clear and universal: in this case they were clearly neither. There was ample space for argument, confrontation, litigation, anomalies, and appeals. Uncertainties were prolonged by the requirement that, before formal sanctions could be

applied, every effort had to be made at reconciliation and compromise. Nev- ertheless, as the 1990s advanced, most disputes were in fact amicably resolved, often as a result of the effective intervention of the official mediator (in effect,

NOVEMBER 2004 11


an ombudsman), Hanifa Cherifi. But at the same time opportunities for ex-

ploitation and manipulation, and the levels of media attention, continued to increase. Underlying the specific issue of dress was the more fundamental

problem of the integration of the Muslim community. Indeed, many thoughtful citizens and commentators are unwilling to accept that there could be in France any recognition of such distinct communities. Although France is far from being the only European country to grapple with such problems, its distinctive history and deep-rooted commitment to a particular understanding of the nature of citizenship exacerbates such universal difficulties. These were of course made tragically more complex and bitter by the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001. Reaction to and misinterpretation of that disaster magnified the fears and doubts of many Europeans, injecting a fresh and aggressive urgency into Muslim claims for fair and equal treatment.

Superimposed on this tragic development was the shock of the French presidential elections in the spring of 2002. The parties of the extreme right grasped every opportunity to inflame islamophobic sentiment and to attract voters from the mainstream parties of the center and left. The result was a shattering defeat ofJospin (the Socialist presidential candidate) and the unanticipated elevation to second place ofJean-Marie le Pen in the polls of the first round. All the mainstream parties, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, now united

temporarily to secure the defeat of the extreme right in the second round of the elections: Chirac won the Elysee by default.

It is from this political background, national and international, that there

emerged the proposal to deal once and for all by a definitive and unambiguous law with the persistent problem of the headscarf. Teachers, in spite of the

apparent progress recently made, were weary of being landed with imprecise responsibilities and powers: many of the more openly laique among them

bitterly resented the continuing challenge to the "School of the Republic." Jospin's successors as leaders of a demoralized Socialist party were unlikely to weaken their position any further by appearing to be halfhearted in their

advocacy of an emotive left-wing cause, namely, the vocal defense of the school ofJules Ferry. Chirac and his allies of course needed to recapture votes from their far-right critics. Paradoxically, only le Pen and his party were unambig- uously against any law: let the Muslims persist in their defiance, demonstrate yet again that they had no wish to be integrated in French society, and therefore be "sent home" more quickly. The astute and ambitious Nicolas Sarkozy doubted the wisdom of introducing a new law that might prove to be unen- forceable, but his position was relatively isolated. In spite of the strenuous and

enlightened efforts of mediators, the problem had certainly not gone away, and it showed no sign of doing so or of losing its media appeal, outside France as well as within. In October 2003, after a long and highly visible dispute, two sisters were excluded from the lycee in Aubervilliers, a mere five miles


Judge

from the center of Paris. Interviews with them were made the subject matter of a book. Their own background indicates something of the complexities of the issues and of the dangers of stereotyping those who became involved in the successive affairs. Their father is Jewish by origin, a lawyer and a com- munist. Their mother does not wear the headscarf and is a teacher from the Kabylia, a Berber region in Algeria not noted for its commitment to traditionally conservative forms of Islam (Le Monde de l'Education, February 2004; Levy and Levy 2004).

The New Law of 2004

The year 2003 was a decisive one in the campaign to assert the integrity of the school of the Republic and to mobilize resistance to what was increasingly represented and resented as a pernicious drift toward fragmentation, multiculturalism, Anglo-Saxon "liberalism," and communautarisme. Jean-Pierre Raf- farin, the prime minister chosen by Chirac, amplified this theme in a speech in April. "The teacher," he declaimed, "does not have in his class Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. He has first and foremost French youngsters, all of whom are members of the school of the Republic" (Le Figaro, April 30, 2004).

Parliament appointed a committee to reflect on the problems and their

possible solutions, while the president himself nominated the members of a

prestigious commission, with Bernard Stasi as its chairman. He was the mediator of the Republic, a high office roughly equivalent to that of an omni-

competent national ombudsman. The members were carefully chosen to represent a variety of views, but none challenged the basis of the doctrine that Raffarin had recently endorsed and that no respectable politician wished or dared to challenge. The commission was constituted to address all the complex issues related to the principles of laicit, and its conclusions covered a wide range of subjects. But it was the issue of the headscarf that was pounced on

by the media, politicians, Muslim apologists, and the apostles of laicisme. The

report published in December 2003 formulated a number of recommenda- tions. It recognized that underlying the tensions between Muslims and the Republic there lurked a legitimate sense of grievance and economic depri- vation: this was a problem that needed to be addressed by, for example, those concerned with urban planning and the provision of housing. This suggestion seems as vague as it is benign. Anything that compromised the neutral character of the French state in matters of religion must be detected and con- demned, and offending anomalies removed. In districts where (as in some parts of Brittany) the only school provided was in fact Catholic, an alternative and fully public school should be opened. The special status of the three

NOVEMBER 2004 13


departments of Alsace-Moselle should be reviewed. Religious instruction there, instead of being a part of the public curriculum from which specific exemptions had to be requested, should be made voluntary. Islam should be added to the list of religions to be taught in the public schools in this special region. But the commission nevertheless concluded, somewhat unconvincingly, that since the current special status (in substance, that established by Napoleon's con-

cordat) was popular with inhabitants, it need not be fundamentally modified. For France as a whole, the list of public holidays should be revised. Half of them are currently related to Christian, indeed Catholic, festivals. One should now be set aside for an Islamic festival, and one for aJewish. The display by pupils of any conspicuous religious symbols was deemed to be inherently unacceptable. The Star of David, the Hand of Fatima, a small crucifix should all be allowed as legitimate expressions of belief, but a large crucifix, theJewish kippa, and the Muslim hiab formally banned. These proposed regulations should be applied uniformly in all public schools but not in the "private" (and of course predominantly Catholic) schools under contract to the state (Com- mission de Reflexion 2003; Le Monde, December 12, 2003).

The official response was immediate: within days of the publication of the

report, President Chirac not only welcomed it but announced that a law on the wearing of conspicuous symbols would be promptly introduced. The nec-

essary legislation was speedily adopted by Parliament. To the public dismay of one of its influential members, Henri Pena-Ruiz, other proposals of the Stasi Commission were-for the moment at least-simply ignored (Liberation, April 23, 2004). Every effort was, and is being, made to present the new law

(effective from September 2004) as neutral and nondiscriminatory, and above all as not being aimed specifically at Muslims. The president strove to convey a message of Republican inclusiveness by inviting the rector of the Paris

Mosque to join the leaders of the other principal faiths in the traditional

exchange of New Year greetings at the Elysee. At the same time, he seized this opportunity to reiterate the one true doctrine. The president made clear that while the inclusion of Dalil Boubakeur did indeed convey a message of

openness and inclusion, it must not be misinterpreted as an endorsement of communautarisme, "which France rejects" (Le Figaro,January 7, 2004). Boubakeur (while regretting it) appealed to Muslims to observe the new law and not to demonstrate against it. Although other Muslim leaders predictably disagreed with him, the early demonstrations were by French standards relatively small and peaceful. The general sense was of an uneasy truce.

While the new law applies to all public schools, except universities, it has no force in the state-funded private, and mostly Catholic, schools. The re- actions of those responsible for the Catholic system were muted and ambivalent: while this exemption represented an important freedom that they would obviously not wish to lose, there was anxiety lest these schools were perceived


Judge

as being set apart from a loyal and national system of schooling. They had fought long enough to preserve the caractlre propre and had no wish to upset the delicate balance that had been achieved in 1959, and directly challenged in 1984. The law extending financial support to them required that in ad- mitting pupils they should respect the same criteria as applied to the public schools and that there should therefore be no discrimination on the grounds of religion. The Catholic authorities could therefore hardly object to the wearing of the hijab in their own schools, provided that it presented no physical dangers. Many Muslim parents were already taking advantage of this freedom, in any case preferring a school that had some religious basis to a public school that had none. They also tended to prefer what is generally believed to be the more disciplined environment of many of the private schools. The interest of Muslim families in such schools had already contributed to a rise in the number of places available in them: the year 2003 witnessed an unexpected addition of some twelve thousand places. In one Catholic school in Roubaix, part of the industrialized conurbation centered upon Lille, 80 percent of the students come from a Muslim background; in another school in Marseille that proportion is as high as 90 percent (Le Monde de I'Education, December 2003). One Catholic educational association estimates that as many as 10 percent of all Muslims of school age now attend Catholic schools; the proportion for the population as a whole at any one time is about 15 percent (Conseil d'Etat 2004, p. 334).

Establishing for themselves any Islamic alternative to the Catholic schools is unlikely to be easy and even less likely to attract very much government enthusiasm. The legal difficulties are not insurmountable: Muslims, likeJews in France, are unlikely to be concerned about the insistence upon nondis- crimination in the admission of students, since very few of other faiths, or of none, are likely to seek admission to Muslim schools.3 Schools with an Islamic character do confront formidable financial and planning obstacles, and they have to operate successfully for five years before being eligible to apply for contractual status and state support. Some early examples of such schools do nevertheless exist. The College Reussite opened in 2001 in Aubervilliers, the same town in which yet another dispute over the headscarf was to erupt two years later. Its style is moderate, and the model is that of the French schools that had flourished during the colonial period in North Africa. In 2003 it admitted only students in the two youngest age groups. It follows all the national programs required in public schools, adding to them religious education and Arabic. It is coeducational, and all the girls wear the foulard. With annual fees of fifteen hundred euros, it is now anxious to secure state funding. The response of the ministry has so far been notably cautious. The school in Lille was opened in order to provide for girls wearing the headscarf and excluded from the public schools in the period 1994-97, and its plans to

NOVEMBER 2004 15


extend its age range to form a lycee are already well advanced. It is connected with the UOIF and therefore represents a very different tradtion from that associated with either the school in Aubervilliers or with the Paris Mosque (Le Monde de l'Education, February 2003).

The vast majority of Muslim students, however, will continue to attend the

public schools and to be subject to all the requirements of the 2004 law.

A Lexicon

That new law, it has been argued above, can be understood by an overseas

observer only in the context of the history of France and with reference to

the tonality given to a cluster of words in the common language of that country. The reader of previous pages will have noticed, and perhaps been irritated

by, what may well have seemed a perverse refusal to translate frequently

recurring words. Of these the most obvious are laicite and the terms closely related to it. But although that is the most striking example, it is far from

being an isolated case. Apparently transparent words like "exception," "iden-

tity," "community," "Republic," "solidarity," "equality," "public service," "state," "school," "secular," and "city" are not in fact the unambiguous equiv- alents of the superficially similar terms in French. They are what the French

themselves callfaux amis: although they may indeed appear to be closely related, the similarities are deceptive. This section of the "effort by an Englishman to

explain to Americans why the French are as the French are" will therefore

attempt to explore the resonances of a dozen French words or phrases echoing

through the preceding pages and seek to illustrate how those same resonances

interact with one another and so generate a distinctive understanding of "so-

ciety" and "nation," and of the relationship of both to the "state."

How distinctive in fact is that understanding? How general and real is the

so-called exceptionfranfaise? The debate swirling in France around the secularity

(not secularism) of the school obviously finds some parallels in the theory and

practice of several other European nations (Bauberot 1994). It has recently been argued that the French position on many matters represents a singularite rather than an exception, and France therefore stands toward one end of an

unbroken spectrum (Conseil d'Etat 2004, p. 359). Whatever the force of that

perhaps oversubtle distinction, the French themselves certainly work hard at

proclaiming their "difference." At an international meeting in the United

States in June 2004 (something of a vintage year for events revealing the

ideological distance of Paris from Washington and London), President Chirac

declined to adopt the casual style of (Texan?) dress assumed by his host and

by many of his fellow guests. This was not the French way of conducting

diplomacy. In a country that was then about to ban the foulard in schools,


Judge

what you wear does have symbolic weight. Similarly in matters of economic and social policy, even right-wing French governments are careful to distinguish their defining principles from those of a "brutal" or liberal capitalism, emphasizing again that they are simply not like other people. This cultivation of a distinctive style and way of life often shades into overt anti-Americanism.

Jose Bove, the antiglobalization activist and somewhat atypical advocate of French peasant interests with a degree in sociology from Berkeley, attracted wide public sympathy for his assault on a McDonald's restaurant in southwest France (Le Monde, July 11, 2003). If a critic wishes to denounce a proposed reform of the school curriculum, he will describe it as a Disneyfication. The

protection of the French language, and deep pride in the richness of French culture (from the established classics to the contemporary cinema), are re-

curring themes in the policies of all governments (Regourd 2002). The minister of culture is a significant, and typically franco-franfais, phenomenon. Impressive investments of effort and money are devoted to the preservation and prop- agation of the French language. The school leaving examination, the bacca- laureat, is a national institution subjected annually to intense public scrutiny and believed to incarnate basic French or Republican values. Similarly, the

beginning of the school year, the rentree, is a ritual occasion rather than a

simple administrative event. Not only traffic jams but educational controversy and political infighting engage public interest. The rentree of 2004 marked the introduction of the new law on religious symbols.

These-a distinctive foreign policy, a distrust of untrammeled capitalism, a persistent strain of anti-Americanism, a determination to preserve French

language and culture at home and abroad, a commitment to a specifically French educational system-are all constitutive elements of the French identite.

They form a powerful cluster, within which the various components reinforce one another. To be French is to be Republicain is to be laique is to be committed to egalite (Coq 1994; Lemosse 1997). This composite identity has been forged over many centuries, repeatedly contested and modified, often imposed from Paris on recalcitrant dissidents, transmuted from a monarchical to a consti- tutional framework, and by the end of the last century brought to an apparently stable equilibrium. The maintenance of that equilibrium is widely believed to

depend on the exclusion of religion from the public school, for religion had

proved to be inherently and inevitably divisive. It follows that eclatement, or

any form of fragmentation, is to be deeply feared (Jelen 1996). Even the generally benign English word "community" troubles the French, by whom communautarisme must therefore be rejected. Given such perceptions, multiculturalism can only be inherently destructive of the integrity of society, which must be only an agglomeration of individual and equal citizens and never degenerate into a patchwork of diverse communities.

La Republique is therefore one and indivisible. Such a "rhetoric," a term not

NOVEMBER 2004 17


used in any pejorative sense, underpins a pervasive sense of solidarite: in the best Republican tradition, citizens support one another, and employers do not

lightly dismiss redundant workers. The state by law therefore seeks to ensure that they shall not. Only in France, perhaps, could it be officially proposed that a gap in the funding of old-age pensions should be plugged by the sacrifice of one public holiday to generate extra government income. The parallel principle of egalite, while not requiring any form of social leveling, does extend far beyond the realm of the law and the courts. Agalite and solidarite together imply, for example, that electricity must be available to all French citizens, however inconveniently remote their homes or farms, at a uniform price. A

change in the status of the employees of the state-owned utility company (embedded in a proposal to open up its capital but never of course to privatize it) provoked an outraged response in June 2004. The employees of the state- owned utilities regard themselves, alongside teachers and many others, as part of the service public-another term that does not chime in English as it does in French. In British as in American ears the very word "state" (as in state

power, or state control) often has a vaguely threatening ring: in France it is most often understood in a more desirably positive sense, as guarantor of the values of the Republic. The assassination of the prefect of Corsica, Claude

Erignac, in February 998 was more than an act of brutal terrorism: it was a frontal challenge to the state and its values (Le Monde, June 3, 2003).

Preeminent among those values is a deep-seated devotion to the Ecole de la

Ripublique. In practical everyday language the term ecole means first and foremost the elementary school, as distinct from the secondary school (the collge and lycee). It can also refer to some prestigious institutions of higher education, as in ecole normale superieure. In Republican rhetoric, however, it has a much wider significance, covering the whole of primary and secondary education and claiming a direct filiation from authentic Republican values. For that very reason, "progressives" seeking to reform the structures of the traditional curriculum must always expect to be denounced as enemies of the school of the

Republic, deliberately undermining the sacrosanct principle of equality. In this context, a respect for egalite requires that all pupils, of whatever background or ability, must have access to the same pure national curriculum. Attempts to provide a curriculum adapted to suit particular students (or even worse to address the alleged needs of members of a particular class or community) are denounced as Disneyfication, as a trahison des clercs (Finkielkraut 1982). Ex-

emption from swimming lessons, or from the study of the Enlightenment, are for precisely the same reasons offensive. But none of the values of the Ecole de la Republique is, of course, as central and revered as that of laicite. Secularity is perhaps the least misleading of available translations for this word, but it remains woefully inadequate. Muslims cannot easily digest and absorb its


Judge

meaning and implications, not least because a common Arabic translation of the slippery word corresponds roughly to "scientism," than which few offerings could be more misleading.4 The word laicite was classified as a neologism in the 1880s, and it served as a convenient banner for the contemporary cam-

paign to expel proselytizing forms of Catholicism from the public school of the day. On the other hand, the noun laic had for centuries been used simply to designate a layman, as that term would still commonly be understood in

English. The adjective laique had likewise enjoyed a long and uncontroversial

history: indeed, even today in the educational context it can still be used as a colorless equivalent of the English "lay"-as, for example, in lepersonnel laique de l'cole catholique. But, from as early as the 1840s the word steadily acquired ideological overtones, implying a rejection of any influence by organized religions upon public education (or indeed on other areas of social life). Indeed, the adjective came to be commonly used as a noun, so that nowadays nobody claiming to be a laique would be in danger of being misunderstood. Finally, the stronger term laicsme came to be more widely deployed, carrying for its adherents and critics alike clear messages about the kind of place a public school must be. The Conseil de l'Action Laique, a powerful coalition of teacher unions and pressure groups, is therefore as opposed to the subsidizing of Catholic schools as it is to the wearing of the headscarf in public schools- and for precisely the same reasons (Bauberot 1990; Bauberot et al. 1994; Barbier 1995; Costa-Lascaux 1996; Harscher 1996; Maury 1996; Mayeur 1997).

It is then hardly surprising if attempts during the 1990s to deal with the problem of the foulard by discussion and mediation on a case-by-case basis generated a sense of growing discomfort. Teachers and heads of schools, imbued with a sense of public service to the citizens of the Republic, increas-

ingly resented being left alone and unsupported to resolve issues that politicians found too hot to handle. Why should laicite mean different things in different

places and at different times? Why should different administrative courts give apparently divergent judgments? On what basis were school principals sup- posed to distinguish between ostentatoire and ostensible? What provision was to be made for students who had been excluded? Could they be allowed to work

privately within the school but not to attend courses? Were judgments and exclusions to be determined on the basis of the amount of damage done to public order or that done to the serene conduct of the establishment? The pressure on the government to settle the matter by passing a new law mounted, and the political shock of the elections of 2002 and persistent and growing public anxiety about the visibility and impact of Islam in France probably made the outcome inevitable.

NOVEMBER 2004 19


Coda

The Muslim headscarf is a highly emotive symbol and revealing symptom of

complex social and cultural difficulties. Any adequate discussion of those difficulties would exceed both the brief and the space assigned to this article.

They are, of course, in no sense peculiar to France: in the early summer of 2004 a great deal of media attention in Britain was devoted to a high court case in which the right of a Muslim girl to attend a secondary school wearing the jilbab (a loose outer garment) was denied. Equally significant, however, was the widely accepted, and legally endorsed, right of the same girl to wear the hiab (Times [London], June 16, 2004). The problem lies not in agreeing that a line must be drawn but in determining where and on what authority that line should be located. All developed societies, and especially those that

lay some claim to Christian roots, grapple with the paradoxes of preserving a distinct national identity while at the same time incorporating the diversities

imported by new streams of immigration. The stronger and more distinctive and more unfamiliar the cultural and religious (including the vestimentary) habits of such immigrants, the more strained the tensions between the im-

peratives of coherence and those of pluralism. Acceptance of any striking differences in the dress adopted by school students connects directly to such issues as the common curriculum (whether in the sciences or in the humanities), the content of meals to be provided at schools, the official recognition of different religious calendars and obligations, marriage and burial customs.

Weaving through them are profound and principled disagreements about the

place of women in society: feminist theorists may disagree among themselves, but there persists (and especially in France) a broad liberal consensus that the

wearing of the headscarf is totally unacceptable on the grounds that it negates the fundamental principle of egalite (Badinter 2003). Underlying, and often

embittering, such disagreements are the patent disadvantages from which

immigrant communities generally suffer, the problems of access to the range of social services available in principle to all citizens, their segregation in

depressed urban estates, frequent difficulties with the language of the so-called host country, and their vulnerability to radicalization.

While these are indeed universal problems, the argument of this article has been that in the French context they are given a particular sharpness by the circumstances of national history and by the nature of "the French exception." That exceptionality was tentatively explored in the attempt made above to define or at least characterize a number of common but untranslatable French terms, of which by far the most relevant and resonant is laicite. The last fifteen

years have been marked by an uneven effort to apply and adapt that deeply encoded concept to the novel challenges presented by the expanding significance of a large Muslim minority, some members of which are perceived as


Judge

being unwilling to conform with the prevailing orthodox norms of the Re- public. Principles that were hammered out over the centuries in the struggles to generate a French identity, and thereafter to create in public life an open and neutral space where "the two Frances" (Catholic and Republican) could constructively coexist, were now applied in the very different circumstances created by a significant Muslim immigration. But the two Frances that now face one another have little in common with their ideological ancestors: the "threat" of the headscarf is totally different from that of the cassock, and it becomes increasingly difficult to apply the same principles of laicite to both (Bauberot 1990). Old-fashioned laiques now complain with some justice that their traditional concerns (e.g., with state subsidies for Catholic schools or the anomalous status of Alsace-Moselle) have been swamped by the current pre- occupation with the foulard (Liberation, July 6, 2004). Such a shift of attention clearly has some perverse effects. Some, but not all, state-supported Catholic schools allow the wearing of the headscarf. For this and for a range of loosely related reasons some Muslim parents prefer the Catholic to the public schools. The number seeking entry is restricted, as in most cases a financial contribution, albeit relatively modest, is required. The Catholic response to a growing Muslim interest in their schools has been uneasy: they have no desire for their schools to become some kind of refuge for such families (Liberation, July 6, 2004). They have good reason to fear that any such development might even reignite the old but apparently latent hostility to the generous settlement secured from the state for their schools: although for the moment eclipsed, 1959, 1984, and 1994 have not been forgotten. In the meantime, although modest efforts are being made by Muslim communities to secure state support for their own schools, complex legal and financial problems make it unlikely that such controversial funding will be secured. The government is most

unlikely to welcome such commitments and has every reason to be appre- hensive of thereby again calling in question the elaborate compromises with Catholics that have been negotiated over the years.

For most Muslims, therefore, the central question refers to how the school authorities will in the coming months and years react to the new law and determine how they themselves are to respond. It seems highly improbable that the new law will of itself solve very much. The early signs were certainly not all that promising. Parliament may well have been meekly supportive of the initiative, since few members of any political party could be expected to vote against a reaffirmation of an emotionally charged Republican principle. But such unanimity of opinion began to crumble as the months went by. Before being finally published in May 2004, the all-important circular regu- lating the precise terms on which the new law is to be applied was the subject of intense debate within the educational establishment. Only 26 members of the representative council responsible for preparing the text actually voted for

NOVEMBER 2004 21


it, with 28 abstaining and 8 opposed (Le Monde de l'Education, June 2004). Much, indeed everything, will now turn on establishing workable distinctions between discreet (acceptable) and conspicuous (unacceptable), and between

religious (unacceptable) and other (acceptable) reasons for adopting any particular form of dress. It is conceded, for example, that a bandanna may legally be worn for nonreligious reasons, but how will it be possible to determine the motives for wearing one? The early response to this circular offered by the moderate Dalil Boubakeur was that, in his opinion, the wearing of a discreet headscarf would therefore be permitted. Less moderate spokesmen, never

overly obedient to the moral authority of the Paris Mosque, went a great deal further. The principal imam in Lyon asserted in July, when French politics traditionally take a long holiday, that he and his colleagues in the UOIF would

encourage girls to go to school in September dressed as they previously had been and would support them and their families if action was taken against them. The situation was abruptly, but not permanently, changed in the early September days when students returned to their schools. By a perverse twist of fate, two French journalists were taken hostage in Iraq, and the repeal of the headscarf law was the price demanded by the terrorists for their release. Public opinion, previously lulled by a belief that consistent opposition to the war in Iraq sheltered France from such attacks, was outraged. It was at once clear to Muslim leaders that they could not possibly afford to appear to

countenance, and still less to approve, either Islamic extremism or external interference in their domestic affairs. A deputation, its three members carefully dressed as ordinary Frenchmen, was dispatched to Iraq to make statements

distancing their community from all such actions and explaining carefully that France was in fact friendly toward its Muslim citizens and that to be laique was not incompatible with being a good Muslim. That delegation included not only a representative of the Paris Mosque but also a leader of the UOIF, which only a few weeks earlier had been encouraging resistance to the new law. In these circumstances, the early days of the school year were very much more peaceful than had been anticipated. Even at the gates of the embattled school in Aubervilliers, there were more television cameras than protesters. Only in Alsace was there significant opposition, and that is of course a very special part of France (Le Monde, September 3, 2004). Fundamentally, however, nothing had changed. The new minister of national education had already insisted that the application of the new law was not negotiable, and on the first day of the school year-after celebrating an unprecedented mood of national cohesion-he went out of his way to emphasize in a television broad- cast that the government had no intention whatsoever of devoting one of the nation's public holidays to a Muslim feast (Le Monde de l'Education, September 2004; Liberation, September 4, 2004). The current atmosphere of uneasy sus-

pense is unlikely to endure for long.


Judge

Notes

1. At the risk of irritating the reader, this is the first of a nexus of words left untranslated, for their meanings are interdependent in a complicated way. It would be grossly misleading at this point to translate the first of these terms as, for example, "lay" or "secular." A later section of this article returns to this theme.

2. This is a dangerous enterprise. This article incorporates personal perspectives and perceptions, but I have tried to avoid the grosser errors by persuading three experts, in different fields, to warn me of any such mistakes. One is well informed on matters related to Islam, one on the complexities of French culture and history, and one on the American understanding of educational policies in other countries. I am grateful to Chris Hewer, Michel Lemosse, and Bill Boyd for their friendly but critical efforts on my behalf, but I remain responsible for the errors that survive.

3. There are some thirty thousand students in Jewish schools, all but four thousand of them supported by the contracts with the state established by the Debre law (Le Monde de l'Education, January 2004).

4. Characteristic of "scientism" is the belief that the inductive methods of the natural sciences are the only source of authentic knowledge and that they alone can yield true knowledge about man and society.

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The Muslim Headscarf and French schools Author- Harry Judge