“We are all republicans”: Political Articulation and the Production of Nationhood in France's Face Veil Debate

Abstract

In July 2010, following a year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling, the French government passed a law prohibiting facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This article takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral politics as a site for articulating, rather than merely reflecting, social identities, I argue that the 2010 ban arose in significant part out of political parties’ struggles to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate politics in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. Specifically, I show that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France's major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the consensus thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It conceals ongoing conflict, both between and within political parties, over the precise meaning(s) of French republican nationhood. The findings thus underscore the relationship between boundary-drawing in the political sphere and the process of demarcating the cultural and political boundaries of nationhood in contexts of immigrant diversity.

National Cultural Frames and Muslims’ Economic Incorporation: A Comparison of France and Canada

“…We further distinguish long-term immigrants, in the country 10 years or more, from more recent arrivals. In Québec, the "mainstream" includes Francophones and Anglophones, and we focus on the former, who are dominant demographically and politically (Laxer 2019).…”

“…Here, we ask whether national cultural frames produce variations in actual employment opportunity by analyzing earnings separately by gender. Our interest in the fate of Muslims is heightened by French legislation enforcing religious neutrality in the public sphere, including workplaces (Laxer 2018; Pauti 2019).…”

“…The French approach to equality is grounded in colorblindness, and references to race in public speeches or statistics are prohibited (Simon 2008). France's emphasis on secularism has been extensively cited in recent debates on regulating religious (mainly Islamic) signs in public and occupational settings (Bowen 2007;Hajjat and Mohammed 2013;Laxer 2018Laxer , 2019. By contrast, Canada defines itself as a nation of immigrants and, with other settler societies such as the United States and Australia, prioritizes rapid progress to citizenship (Reitz 2014).…”