Jeremy Ahearne University of Warwick

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1 532195FRC / French Cultural StudiesAhearne research-article2014 French Cultural Studies Laïcité: A parallel French cultural policy ( ) French Cultural Studies 2014, Vol. 25(3/4) The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav DOI: / frc.sagepub.com Jeremy Ahearne University of Warwick Abstract The recasting of laïcité in France between 2002 and 2012 constituted a channel through which succeeding right-wing governments endeavoured to secure a form of cultural hegemony. This article focuses on the period The process leading to the anti-veil legislation of 2004 under President Chirac revealed how this symbolically charged motif once associated with the left had been displaced and integrated into a traditional and restrictive right-wing cultureshaping programme. Interior minister Sarkozy s endeavours between 2002 and 2004 to fashion an institutional dialogue with Islam in France were initially at odds with Chirac s programme. However, by 2007, Sarkozy had changed tack to produce an alternative reframing of laïcité, positively celebrating the intertwining of national and Catholic cultures, whilst using Islam as a negative foil for the projection of that identity. This laid the groundwork for the subsequent hardening of laïcité debates and the appropriation of the term by the far right. Keywords Jacques Chirac, cultural policy, culture, France, laïcité, laicity, political secularism, Nicolas Sarkozy Back in 1989, when French Cultural Studies was founded, the location of cultural policy in France might have seemed straightforward. This was the heyday of Jack Lang, when the nation appeared hegemonic in defining the scope and dynamic of cultural policy. Since then, la politique culturelle (in the sense of arts policy) has become less prominent, and does not feature as a core strategic element of governmental programmes. However, strategic endeavours to shape national cultures sets of norms and symbolic matrices remain central to the process of contemporary government. We can effectively call these cultural policies, even if governments do not. But we may have to look for such culture-shaping policies outside the sites that are officially labelled as Corresponding author: Jeremy Ahearne, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick, Milburn House, Coventry CV4 7HS, UK. j.ahearne@warwick.ac.uk

2 Ahearne 321 cultural policy. We might think of them as parallel or sometimes implicit cultural policies (Ahearne, 2009). Policies and debates around laïcité have constituted one such site. Indeed, in the decade , we have seen a political mutation in the dominant understanding of the term a kind of transvaluation or Umwertung which becomes integrated as a central instrument by succeeding right-wing executives (Chirac, Sarkozy) in endeavours to produce a cultural hegemony. I propose in this article to explore the first moves in this process (2002 7) through which a notion traditionally associated with the left was appropriated by the mainstream right. This reframing of the term in both positive and restrictive modes would lay the ground for a subsequent escalatory phase ( ) during which that mainstream right would enter into unprecedented competition with an ideologically realigned far right for ownership over this most symbolically charged of French political motifs : A law for the veil For all the purity of its champions professions of faith, laïcité on the ground has always been a matter of compromise and adjustment: the state maintains churches built before 1905; it pays salaries to chaplains in schools, prisons and armies; the salary and running costs of the many Catholic schools in contract with the state are publicly funded; the state gives slots on public television to representatives of different religious movements; municipal councils contrive ways to help in the construction of new places of worship for both Christian and Muslim clienteles; etc. The Council of State gradually developed a consistent jurisprudence after the veil controversy of 1989, according to which school exclusion of girls based solely on the wearing of headscarves was overturned, while exclusion based on various aggravating factors (disruption of public order, failure to attend specific classes, etc.) was upheld (Bowen, 2007: 92). This could have endured as one further form of settled adjustment. What prevented it from doing so? A global event such as the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the USA can clearly not be discounted as part of the causal cluster; nor can the pervasive reach of the dominant clash of civilisations interpretative model that accompanied this (Huntington, 1996). In themselves, however, they cannot explain the wholesale recasting and political realignment of laïcité that took place between 2002 and As an indicator of medium-term trends, an IFOP opinion poll conducted shortly after the attacks (22 28 September) revealed, in comparison to a corresponding 1994 poll, increasingly positive attitudes to Muslims among the French population as a whole, and also towards attempts to integrate their religious and cultural aspirations into the national mainstream (even if attitudes to Islam itself as a religion remained relatively negative) (Ternisien, 2001). Indeed when the Socialist minister for education Jack Lang asked Régis Debray in 2001 to prepare a report on the issue of religious education within French schooling, the agenda on the part of both men was manifestly both pacifying and ecumenical. Debray conceptualised his brief quite clearly as a cultural issue. His thinking had moved well beyond the image of a hard-line laicist that had stuck to him since his involvement in the agitation around the 1989 headscarf affair. He now argued that traditionally cast laïcité in French schooling, through its exclusion of religious references from a secular educational sphere, had aggravated rather than mitigated the spread of a generalised ignorance about religious affairs ( une inculture religieuse ) (Debray, 2002: 15). Not only did this leave pupils with a superficial understanding of the cumulative continuity that is the history of human culture over millennia, and indeed left students ill-equipped to negotiate the canonical works of the classical French literary tradition (such as Hugo s Notre Dame de Paris) (2002: 16), it also left them more exposed than they would otherwise have been to the influence of less rationally controlled introductions to religious

3 322 French Cultural Studies 25(3/4) worldviews. Debray argued for the consolidation in schools of the non-religious study of religions; like the landmark Joutard report of 1989, he advised against the introduction of a dedicated school subject (the curricula of history, literature and art could be further adapted to integrate religious subject-matter from a religiously neutral perspective). Nonetheless, for Debray, it was the culture of laïcité itself that needed to be changed: in an influential formulation, he argued for the passage from a laïcité d incompétence (an education system that was incompetent, in all senses of the word, for dealing with religious questions) to a laïcité d intelligence (an education system for which a rational, reasonable and even empathetic approach to religion was not a taboo) (2002: 43). Debray s proposals achieved the relatively rare feat of finding acceptance not just from the Socialist government that commissioned them, but also from the incoming Gaullist government of spring The climate might have appeared ripe for a further period of settling adjustment between the French secular state and the organised religions in its midst. As is well known, the 2002 presidential elections had been something of an anomaly. The Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin had been forced into third place in the first round by the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. The second round would consist in a face-off between Le Pen and the Gaullist incumbent Jacques Chirac. This was in symbolic terms shocking and untrodden territory, as a farright candidate had never before in the Fifth Republic reached the last round of a presidential election. Of course, the final result was never in doubt: the anti-le Pen vote ensured Chirac a misleading majority of 82 per cent. His supporters described the negative vote more positively in terms of a republican surge. Once the euphoria of victory had ebbed away and the routinisation (some said inertia) of prolonged office had once again set in, their minds turned to ways in which something of that surge might once again be manufactured. Late 2002 and early 2003 had seen another of the apparently (since 1989) cyclical spikes in headscarf concern as affairs emerged in the magnifying element of public media space (Ternisien, 2003). Some saw a new tipping point in the public booing of the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy in his unprecedented personal visit to the annual congress of the UOIF (Union des Organisations Islamiques de France) in April 2003 (Sarkozy s own position was complex, and we shall see below that this event is not straightforward to interpret) (Bowen, 2007: ; Kepel, 2012: 154 5). Some around Chirac saw a political opportunity here. The ground had been laid over the long term by an advocacy coalition that had developed since the early 1990s, uniting parliamentarians of the Gaullist right with the traditional defenders of a strict laïcité on the left in lobbying as an active minority for legislation on the veil (Lorcerie, 2008). The time now seemed to be ripe to consolidate this takeover of laïcité by the mainstream right. At the same time, this would perhaps allow Chirac to isolate his emerging rival Nicolas Sarkozy, who had developed an original and somewhat taboo-breaking stance as interior minister, actively seeking to nurture a French institutional Islam, and opposing legislation on the veil in schools. This thinking was potently crystallised in a report published in June 2003 by François Baroin, a UMP politician and close adviser of Chirac. From our perspective, we can note that Baroin, from the outset of his report, frames laïcité not simply in terms of a (broad) cultural policy problematic, but as a clear response to a left-wing cultural policy agenda seen as dating back to the 1980s. The text of the report expressly nests a resonant notion traditionally associated with the left within a discursive framework of the political right. Laïcité is described as shifting from a clearly defined religious domain to the sphere of culture and identity ; and within that sphere, a traditional republican, authoritative and nationally focused common culture has to be defended against the laxity of a multicultural and communitarian approach promoted by the left for the previous 20 years. The apparently stable (if, he admits, somewhat mythical ) reference point of French laïcité is proposed as a perfect tool for a quite self-consciously framed project of government through culture. He even looks to associate it with a new May for the right (not May 1968, but a May of the national republican surge May 2002) (Baroin, 2003: introduction).

4 Ahearne 323 The showcasing of a Chirac fit to resist the dangers not simply of radicalised Islam but also the rival right of a consistorial Sarkozy and a multiculturally compromised left required a more prominent platform than a relatively discreet strategy report. 1 The same Chiraquian circles also initiated a special commission of enquiry at the National Assembly presided over by Jean-Louis Debré (Weil, 2007: 37). Baroin advocated widening the debate in other ways, notably through the setting-up of an ad hoc major commission under an incontestably authoritative chair on the model of the 1987 Long Commission on nationality law, and broadcasting its proceedings on the parliamentary channel (Baroin, 2003, part IV section A2). This would be the Stasi Commission, which was officially set up in July 2003 and which delivered its report in December 2003; it provided the symbolic intellectual legitimacy for the law banning ostensible religious signs in schools that was promptly and theatrically processed in early The place of the Stasi Commission itself in this process was not quite that of the well-lubricated cog in a process driven from elsewhere. Although this metaphor captures something of its objective function, at least as orchestrated in the short term, there were more unruly elements in it that would lead to a richer long-term fermentation (Ahearne, 2010: 76 85). For present purposes, however, we might note that, like Baroin, key contributors to the Stasi Commission came to theorise the issue of laïcité as a problem at the interface of government and culture. For Debray, as he put it at the time, la laïcité sera une culture ou elle ne sera pas (Debray, 2003: 37). He was arguing here in the first case against those who considered that laïcité was a matter purely for legal codification, specifying the modalities of political secularism (see for example Roy, 2005: 160 1). For Debray, if laïcité as a set of values was going to be effectively transmitted, it needed to be embedded in subjects dispositions through a cluster of persuasive narratives, images and shared symbols: it had to signify a desirable way to live rather than an abstract legal injunction. Certainly, Debray s position was not identical to that of laïcité s harder-line civil religionists : for him primary communities (religious, ethnic, social) were not obstacles to identification with an overarching lay republic. Their hypertrophy in particular circumstances pointed instead to a crisis or a failure on the part of the republic itself to show how these pre-existing cultural attachments could be embedded within a broader cultural community that had to be politically forged and maintained (Debray, 2003: 35 8). Other contributors began not with the prerequisites for a secular national cultural community, but with the primacy of cultural rights. This was advanced notably by Alain Touraine in a letter to the Commission. Indeed Jean Baubérot took up the notion and used it as the basis for dissenting from the Commission s final recommendation on the issue of the headscarf. For Baubérot, these cultural rights concerned a guarantee of access to education and culture for pupils (which obviously would be curtailed by school exclusions), and also a guarantee of cultural expression unless this obstructed issues of expression and access for others. Touraine finally came down on the side of a prohibitory article in the law (on the grounds that those managing the issues on the ground needed this support). Baubérot, however, argued that a law that began with an unconditional prohibition (of ostensible religious signs) was contrary to his understanding of a contemporary laïcité founded on the premise of guaranteed cultural rights (of access, belief and expression) (Baubérot, 2004a). Indeed, Touraine would later criticise the overall legislative process of which the Stasi Commission had represented one moment precisely because it took up only the prohibitory aspect of the report, and completely neglected the dimension of cultural diversity (Renaut and Touraine, 2005: 153). Across the Baroin report and reflections around the Stasi report, therefore, we see the issue of laïcité being cast as what we might call a broad cultural policy dispute. It is as if there was an unstated agreement to conduct the debate in these terms, but vigorous disagreement as to what this then entailed, based on the weighting and respective positions assigned to such key cardinal notions as national culture, cultural plurality and cultural rights. The Commission s final report makes

5 324 French Cultural Studies 25(3/4) respectful gestures towards all these notions, but one is struck by the weighting it gives to the nationally federative dimension. It notes, for example, how all democratic states respect freedom of conscience, but that France is distinctive because it has érigé la laïcité au rang de valeur fondatrice, and has assigned this the status of a pierre angulaire du pacte républicain (Stasi, 2003: 21). In Bernard Stasi s preface, he notes the attachment of the great majority of citizens to the principle of laïcité, suggesting that instinctivement, ils reconnaissent dans ce principe une valeur sur laquelle est fondée l unité nationale, une valeur qui rassemble, en même temps qu un garant de la liberté individuelle (Stasi, 2003: 12). Laïcité, we might infer, is being asked to do a lot of cultural work in contemporary France. It has extended itself considerably beyond a simple institutional means through which the more fundamental ends of freedom of belief and equal respect for different beliefs might be upheld (to use the critical framework developed by Maclure and Taylor, 2011). This is not simply because it carries with it a further cluster of epistemic, normative and ethical values that citizens are expected to internalise in their own self-government. It is also because the term has semantically thickened to become a national identity marker increasingly exploitable across the political spectrum as a whole. This hard cultural version of laïcité was clearly in the process of becoming the ideologically dominant understanding. Chirac s government took the single proposal concerning the wearing of ostensible religious signs (neglecting the Commission s other 21 proposals), turned it into a national priority and put it through the stages of cabinet discussion, parliamentary commission and mediatised National Assembly debate in short order between January and February The Socialist Party, keen not to be outflanked on what was traditionally their territory, adopted if anything a harder line, proposing (unsuccessfully) an amendment that would ban all visible religious signs (legal experts suggested this would breach the European Convention of Human Rights) (Bernard, 2004; Ternisien, 2004). There was certainly some unease within the government: Sarkozy s opposition to the law was well known, but the Chirac loyalist foreign affairs minister Dominique de Villepin expressed his concern within cabinet about the likely effect of this apparently repressive law on France s image abroad (where it had acquired a capital of soft power in the Arab world through its opposition to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq) (Ceaux and Ridet, 2004). For Chirac, however, this was a pressing domestic cultural concern. As Bowen has argued, a combination of governmental artifice and media habit had allowed an impression to become widespread whereby something had to be done (Bowen, 2007: 99). The stakes were symbolic in virtually all senses of the word (the prime object of legislation was after all, literally, the symbols that small numbers of young girls wore when they came to class). Precisely because of this, however, the political pressures that had built up for a certain mode of government through culture seemed unstoppable. The law was passed on 15 March 2004 and came into effect the following autumn. Arguably, its terse formulation left scope for interpretative uncertainty ( Dans les écoles, les collèges et les lycées publics, le port de signes ou tenues par lesquels les élèves manifestent ostensiblement une appartenance religieuse est interdit ). This uncertainty, at least as regards headscarves, was removed in the supplementary circular issued on 18 May, where the object of that legislation was explicitly set out (Article 2.1: Les signes et tenues qui sont interdits sont ceux dont le port conduit à se faire immédiatement reconnaître par son appartenance religieuse tels que le voile islamique, quel que soit le nom qu on lui donne, la kippa ou une croix de dimension manifestement excessive ). Putting aside the unlikelihood of the threat of excessively large crosses, in the following years the application of the law did cause the relations between headscarves and schooling to fade as a site of concern (though not the headscarf as such). Cases for mediation dropped substantially over the following years (Le Bars, 2007). One unexpected contributing factor had been the kidnapping of two French journalists in August 2004 in Iraq with the demand that the French government reverse

6 Ahearne 325 its headscarf legislation. This led the main Muslim organisations in France to make the case more forcefully and consensually (for those who had not already adopted the position) that Muslims in France could and should adopt the laws of the Republic. But beyond this manifest success, the longer-term effects of the law were less sure. Many Muslims would retain the sense, even while accepting the external constraint of the law, that their religion was an object of suspicion and repression in their own country (Khosrokhavar, 2009). More widely, it would embed an understanding across society as a whole of laïcité as a primarily repressive tool to be directed principally against Islam. The legislative process would also have a significant effect upon the landscape of institutional Islam in France. It put established and quasi-representative bodies in a compromised position (notably the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (CDCM) and the UOIF), torn between their need to represent a certain base and their need for state recognition (Kepel, 2012: ). (These bodies will be discussed below.) This opened the way for more radical organisations to acquire a new legitimacy based on their very independence from the state (as seen, for example, in the protests against the legislation organised in January 2004). This would start to undermine a whole seam in French state action over the previous 15 years that had sought not only to collaborate with various Muslim organisations, and indeed not simply to recognise them (as the 1905 law notionally prohibited it from doing), but also to create a purpose-built Muslim body that it could then go on to recognise above others. This seam tended to be less prominently reported than succeeding headscarf affairs, but it is a good example of the compromises and adjustments through which the apparently immaculately secular French state has sought to manage contemporary cultural complexity : Nicolas Sarkozy s laïcité positive The politician who had done most to consolidate this seam was Nicolas Sarkozy during his first stint as interior minister (2002 4), most emblematically through the negotiated creation in 2003 of the CFCM, which was to be the state s official interlocutor on matters pertaining to Islam. But work on such a recognised interlocutor had been going on intermittently for some 20 years (it is as if the French state and municipalities act with one hand in a way their other hand will not recognise ). Indeed one should take the history of France s attempts to govern Muslim subjects back to its colonial era and its attempts to represent a great Muslim power : the indigenous population in Algeria were officially assigned by default a Muslim status, and the freshly secular French state contrived a way to finance a grand Mosque opened in Paris in 1926 (Bowen, 2007: 35 9). After Algerian independence, that mosque continued to function as a hub for the government of sections of France s Muslim population the French state in effect working in partnership with the Algerian authorities in this instance, as it did with other foreign states such as Morocco for other populations. However, such forms of partnership or subcontracting started to seem insufficient by the end of the 1980s. The suburbs where North African immigrants were concentrated had become socially and economically blighted; established structures of solidarity (such as those around the French Communist Party) were being replaced by Islamic associations. At the same time, the Algerian state had entered a severe crisis of its own, unable to control radical Islam within its own frontiers, let alone in France: there were fears that the influence of the Islamic Salvation Front (and after 1992 the Armed Islamic Group) was permeating across the Mediterranean into France. For Gilles Kepel, it was a cluster of such worries in 1989 that prompted the French state to try to take into its own hands the institutional management of Islam in France (Kepel, 2012: 146). The first attempt at creating a recognised and representative Muslim interlocutor to co-manage and legitimate this endeavour was the creation in 1989 under the Socialist interior minister Pierre Joxe of the Comité de réflexion sur l Islam en France; then came the Conseil représentatif des

7 326 French Cultural Studies 25(3/4) Musulmans de France under the Gaullist Charles Pasqua (minister ); the major consultation (istichara) under Jean-Pierre Chevènement (minister ); and finally the CFCM definitively established as a working institution by Sarkozy. Thus what Sarkozy s contemporary critics saw as a pre-laïque, consistorial or even gallican move setting up a state-recognised representative religious body was not simply a personal break with orthodox political secularism; it followed a long series of attempts by successive French governments to find ways of steering the Muslim culture on its soil in particular directions. The establishment of the CFCM breached enshrined lay principles. It risked treating particular populations through the prism of their (supposed) religious beliefs (voting was based on mosque attendance, which was used as an index of religious practice, but where did this leave cultural Muslims who did not attend mosques?). The ensuing representation would prove vulnerable to critiques on both sides should the politically secular state be fashioning such a body? Did the body s very proximity to that state compromise its capacity to represent Muslim interests? But Sarkozy was unapologetic about recasting French laïcité in what he later called a positive manner. Unlike the left, who tended to see Islamic belief as a symptom of other problems, Sarkozy saw no incompatibility between a traditional religious belief and participation in republican affairs. He had come rapidly to the conclusion on coming to office as minister in 2002 that he could work with the hegemonically dominant UOIF (which is close to the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt). Indeed the UOIF would, in turn, become the dominant force within the CFCM, though tensions with Algerian and Moroccan influences in particular would prove a persistent issue. Contrary to established views of French laïcité (whereby religion is confined to a more or less extensively defined private sphere), Sarkozy saw it as his role to promote positively the visibility of (authorised) religion. This would help its integration into mainstream republican culture and also (in Sarkozy s political calculus) provide mediation and support in his endeavours to maintain public order within socially volatile French suburbs (Geisser and Le Bars, 2007). If this image of Sarkozy as a demanding friend of Islam has become obscured, it is because this first political calculus became overlaid by another that eventually pulled him in a very different direction. The positions of both Sarkozy (temporarily) and the UOIF (definitively) were weakened in their respective political fields by the process leading to the law of Sarkozy, who was opposed to this legislation, was left isolated on this issue within the UMP (indeed one can plausibly argue that this was part of Chirac s underlying intention). Since 1989 the UOIF had made the issue of headscarves in schools the emblem of their commitment to an Islam de France, but their very proximity to the state now banning the scarves hampered their capacity to mobilise against the law, while the adoption of the law itself signalled the defeat of that longstanding campaign (Kepel, 2012). It was ironic that a tipping point inaugurating this process can also be seen in the apparent culmination of Sarkozy s attempts to integrate the UOIF into the political mainstream. He broke all precedent in April 2003 by being the first French minister officially to address the UOIF annual congress in Le Bourget. However, in the course of that speech, seeking no doubt to reassure his traditional political base, he asserted forthrightly that he supported the banning of headscarves not in schools but on identity photographs. He was roundly booed at this point, and that image of a French interior minister being turned on by a hostile Muslim crowd was what endured as the mediatised symbol of the meeting. Whether this was a miscalculation or an elaborate double play on Sarkozy s part, the dynamic between governmental laïcité and Muslim culture would no longer be the same. The second political calculus emerged dramatically after the major riots that raged in French suburbs in the autumn of The mediating capacity of the state s partner Muslim organisations proved to be limited (a fatwa issued by the UOIF condemning the violence went almost entirely unheeded they had no purchase on the social groups involved). Sarkozy opted

8 Ahearne 327 for a different tack, branding the rioters (or, some felt, the residents en masse) as racaille, and promising to rid the streets of them with high-pressure hoses ( Kärcher ). This went down very well with the traditional right and far-right constituencies that Sarkozy needed for his developing presidential campaign but it burnt his bridges with most of France s Islamic institutional organisations. They felt his approach had become specifically anti-muslim, especially once he started introducing calculated slights in his media interviews he referred to the cutting of sheep s throats in neighbouring apartments in a television interview. 2 In the 2007 elections the UOIF would indirectly but clearly convey its support for the centrist candidate François Bayrou. This political realignment did not cause Sarkozy to abandon the theme of laïcité. On the contrary, having won the 2007 presidential election on a ticket of economic liberalism, rupture with regard to traditional French statist patterns, and projected toughness on law and order, it was not long before he returned to his iconoclastic ways. It is as though laïcité provides, in French contemporary contexts, a source of resonance and iconic projection that a politician as adept in symbolic manipulation as Sarkozy could not neglect. Of course, in order to project effectively, he had to break with expectations (a recurrent feature of Sarkozy s public performances that guaranteed media coverage and showed that his iconoclasm was not pure rashness or impetuousness, as is sometimes suggested). The consistorial strategy of drawing Islam into the French institutional landscape, while it had not been abandoned, was no longer a means of forward momentum. In this regard Sarkozy had stepped back from his erstwhile plans, such as the authorisation of direct state subsidy for the building of mosques. 3 Sarkozy, with his advisers Henri Guiano and the Catholic Emmanuelle Mignon, decided on a different tack: the reactivation of the original conflict between Catholicism and laïcité, two opposing poles whose contrived combination could still deliver a calculated politico-symbolic charge (Baubérot, 2008: 15 21). 4 This was presented under the Sarkozyan rubric of laïcité positive. The pretext for this relaunch was Sarkozy s visit to Rome in December 2007 for his induction as honorary canon of St John Lateran s Basilica Palace, a now slightly surreal honour ritually awarded to every French sovereign since Henri IV, which republican presidents decline or accept with varying degrees of discretion certainly none has ever accepted so ostensibly as Sarkozy (Baubérot, 2008: 27 33). If the typical approach of Catholic cultural policy, in broad terms, has been a process of inculturation (embedding its norms and rituals within other cultures), then one might see Sarkozy s speech at the Lateran Basilica as a symbolic endorsement of that policy. 5 The overriding theme of the speech is the restoration of an intimate and enduring interweaving of French national and Catholic cultures that have been unduly separated. In coming to Rome, Sarkozy proclaims, j assume pleinement le passé de la France et ce lien si particulier qui a si longtemps uni notre Nation à l Église (Sarkozy, 2007). He cites a list of French Catholic authors and other figures to show that la foi chrétienne a pénétré en profondeur la société française, sa culture, ses paysages, sa façon de vivre, son architecture, sa littérature and that les racines de la France sont essentiellement chrétiennes. Indeed Sarkozy contends that laïcité in its traditional understandings has, in a crime against its own culture, tried to cut off France from these roots. In a tendentious but, through his very performance, officialised rewriting of history, he presents the Catholic Church as the victim of a vindictive 1905 law of separation (in fact the law was liberally framed and then more liberally adapted, and frustrated much of the Catholic hierarchy at the time precisely because it did not allow the church the option of outlawed institutional martyrdom) (Baubérot, 2004b: ). And, resurrecting a now almost folkloric staple of French nineteenthcentury polemics, he presents the emblematic vector of early republican socialisation, the primary school teacher (instituteur), as playing a less fundamental role in the transmission of France s core abiding values than his equally emblematic mythical foil and antagonist, the village priest (le curé).

9 328 French Cultural Studies 25(3/4) Sarkozy s assertions are not all simply mistaken, of course. France the secular state is also a nation whose rituals, landscape and language are deeply structured by its Catholic past. In terms of the laïcité positive that Sarkozy was advocating, however, this cultural legacy is mobilised in a new manner, suggesting that the contemporary state should simply relinquish its endeavours to remain neutral in its dealings with different religions (these endeavours are prescribed in Article 2 of the 1905 law La République ne reconnaît, ne salarie ni ne subventionne aucun culte (Legifrance website)). Some religions, Sarkozy s speech implies, are more essential than others and are to be recognised as such. Catholics were not used to be being treated quite so fulsomely by republican leaders, though Sarkozy s relations with this constituency were not so straightforward as he might have hoped, since traditional Catholics were reportedly shocked by the mediatised extravagance of Sarkozy s private life, while the French Catholic hierarchy actually remained attached to France s lay post-1905 settlement which guaranteed their independence and freedom of manoeuvre, and remained wary of Sarkozy s gestures (Le Bars, 2008). In the short term, Sarkozy s further recasting of laïcité was doubtless a success: as another symbolic rupture with established French procedure, it guaranteed him media resonance and portrayed him as a bold, internationally significant figure breaking with the taboos of a more blinkered recent past (at least for those who belonged to his natural political constituency). At the same time, however, one could interpret Sarkozy s interventions, particularly at the Lateran Basilica, as consolidating a further element in the nouvelle laïcité that emerged between 2002 and As the Catholic heritage itself was integrated as part of the very national culture that a laïcité positive was supposed to protect and nurture, it was exempted from the repressive common understanding of the term that could now be turned more resolutely on religions that were not perceived as part of that heritage. Notes 1. Sarkozy s creation of a Muslim institution for official state recognition (discussed below) was sometimes compared to Napoleon s policy for managing the nation s religions through the creation of recognised central bodies ( consistories ) (Rémond, 2005: 41 4). 2. J ai une question à vous poser, TF1, 5 February The idea was contained in the Machelon report of 2006, which he had commissioned. It would have required a rewriting of the emblematic 1905 law, and Sarkozy had decided not to go this far. 4. Mignon wrote the Lateran speech. 5. The Catholic doctrine of inculturation dates from the second half of the twentieth century, but describes a much older pattern of strategic relations with the cultures on which Catholicism sought to graft itself (Roy, 2008: 39 95). References Ahearne J (2009) Cultural policy explicit and implicit: a distinction and some uses. International Journal of Cultural Policy 15(2): Ahearne J (2010) Intellectuals, Culture and Public Policy in France: Approaches from the Left. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Baroin F (2003) Pour une nouvelle laïcité. Paris: Club Dialogue et Initiative. Baubérot J (2004a) Annexe: proposition faite par Jean Baubérot à la Commission Stasi. In: J Baubérot, D Bouzar and J Costa-Lascoux (eds) Le Voile, que cache-t-il? Paris: Éditions de l Atelier, pp Baubérot J (2004b) Laïcité , entre passion et raison. Paris: Seuil. Baubérot J (2008) La Laïcité expliquée à M. Sarkozy et à ceux qui écrivent ses discours. Paris: Albin Michel. Bernard P (2004) Le Conseil d État juge le projet de loi sur la laïcité conforme à la Constitution. Le Monde, 27 January.

10 Ahearne 329 Bowen J R (2007) Why the French Don t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ceaux P and Ridet P (2004) Voile: M. de Villepin émet des réserves sur les effets de la loi. Le Monde, 24 January. Debray R (2002) L Enseignement du fait religieux dans l école laïque: rapport au ministre de l Éducation nationale. Paris: Odile Jacob. Debray R (2003) Ce que nous voile le voile: la République et le sacré. Paris: Gallimard. Geisser V and Le Bars S (2007) Pour les politiques, l objet islam est devenu un créneau (entretien avec Vincent Geisser). Le Monde, 23 February. Huntington SP (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kepel G (2012) Quatre-vingt-treize: essai. Paris: Gallimard. Khosrokhavar F (2009) Ce que la loi sur la burqa nous voile. Le Monde, 1 August. Le Bars S (2007) L École sans le voile. Le Monde, 9 April. Le Bars S (2008) Laïcité: M. Sarkozy théorise le rôle important qu il assigne à la religion; les catholiques de droite sont gênés par la vie privée du président. Le Monde, 15 February. Legifrance.gouv.fr: le service public de la diffusion du droit. Available at: Lorcerie F (2008) La Loi sur le voile : une entreprise politique. Droit et société 68(1), Maclure J and Taylor C (2011) Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Renaut A and Touraine A (2005) Un débat sur la laïcité. Paris: Stock. Roy O (2005) La Laïcité face à l Islam. Paris: Stock. Roy O (2008) La Sainte Ignorance: le temps de la religion sans culture. Paris: Seuil. Rémond R (2005) L Invention de la laïcité: de 1789 à demain. Paris: Bayard. Sarkozy N (2007) Déclaration de M. Nicolas Sarkozy, Président de la République, sur les racines chrétiennes de la France et sur sa conception de la laïcité, Rome, Palais du Latran, le 20 décembre Available at: Stasi B (2003) Rapport de la Commission de réflexion sur l application du principe de laïcité dans la République remis au Président de la République le 11 décembre Paris: La Documentation française. Ternisien X (2001) Une meilleure acceptation par l opinion. Le Monde, 4 October. Ternisien X (2003) Il n y a que 150 cas conflictuels, selon la médiatrice de l éducation nationale. Le Monde, 2 June. Ternisien X (2004) Les Musulmans s inquiètent de la future loi sur la laïcité. Le Monde, 6 January. Weil P (2007) Introduction: la loi de 1905 et son application depuis un siècle. In: P. Weil (ed.) Politiques de la laïcité au XXe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp Author biography Jeremy Ahearne is Professor of Cultural Policy Studies and Director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on French culture and politics. His most recent book, Government through Culture and the French Right, , was published in 2014.