The Soapbox

“‘Liberty, equality, brotherhood’? Reality”: last November, this questioning of the French national motto was making the headlines of the quite respected British newspaper, the Independent. Playing along with the stereotype of the “welfare states” France is proud of displaying, the daily was reflecting on the urban riots which had developed in Paris; according to the journalist, those social and ethnical protestations openly demonstrated the failure of a so-called “French model of Integration”. Since this unusual and though expectable explosion of resentment, scholars, politicians and sociologists have put their head together in order to tackle problems at their roots: what is wrong now in France with this highly controversial issue of integration? As usual, once the Pandora box opened, it is useless trying to close it again: now that a few voices have dared to express their reflections over the relevance of the French model of integration, all the doubts, all the claims, all the criticisms feel free to sprinkle.

But in order to fully understand what the world “integration” means in France, what the French people expect from their model, and so why the social tensions are overshadowing the stage today, an analysis should not boil down to the poor convincing “clash of civilization” theory, or so the denounced “incompatibility” between Islam and the Republic, in other words with our Western most rooted values. Of course, it would be the easiest and more comfortable solution to state that, as the cartoon episode encapsulates, there is a widening gap between a reactionary and religious sphere on the one hand, an a liberal, free and tolerant world on the other hand.

There is no denying that Europe, and particularly France, because of its colonial past and its important immigrant population, is faced with a cultural and social issue. However, an historical approach perfectly demonstrates that the confrontation between a traditional religious strength and republican imperatives is a characteristic of French development. Once upon a time, the Catholics and the Church were the most ferocious opponents to the republic and its principles of equality and secularism. To summarize, one would be unable today to interpret the current phenomenon at stake in France without adopting a relative approach, based on a historical perspective, providing with both a definition of the “model of integration” and its previous assaults.

This series of articles is meant to offer the patient and methodical reader with all the necessary tools to analyse the most dramatic events shattering the France society. We will conjure up in a second article those problematic events. But before discussing the news, let us speak about the “French model of integration”. Assuming that this French model did exist, we will have to enter in deep details into its characteristics, shaped by several centuries of a quite tormented and unique history.

Contrary to what could be expected, the ideals of equality and homogeneity which lay at the core of the French model did not spring out at the end of the XXth century in order to smother the various waves of immigrants struggling to merge into the French society. It is paramount to keep in mind that the frame of the French model of integration stems from the dawn of the French Revolution, of the principles developed by the French philosophers during the Enlightenment movement, and that those principles have been lived out throughout the several republican regimes France has known in its history. The longevity of the model, its endless implementation and its rooted presence in social mentality may explain why the current questioning of the French system of integration reveals to be such a thorny issue.

In the eighteenth century, while France was still ruled by a monarchy of divine right, the society was undermined by legal inequalities between men: depending on one’s position in one “social order”, one subject had to abide by special “privileges”[1]. The French revolution was a tremendous attempt to do away with this widespread heterogeneity and a wonderful dream of establishing equality for all men: equality in front of the law, in front of justice, in front of taxation, in front of dignity. As intellectuals like Rousseau had hoped, a nation was becoming to be built thanks to the agreement of free citizens. The myth of the “social contract” was about to become reality: through the vote, each person was entitled to express its will to be associated with a general community, to be ruled by a law that he had contributed to create through the election of a National Assembly. Belonging to the Nation required a permanent involvement, or at least, as it was said, a daily eagerness to be part of a global political body. In reaction to what was dubbed the “old regime”[2], the revolutionary men decided that the Law would encapsulate this new conception of society. Since the Revolution period, France has never abandoned its tendency to regulate society by Law, making the latter become a kind of respected and mystical symbol, alluding to the end of the arbitrary. Since the Law was made in Paris, by the National Assembly, everybody has to abide by a rule he had indirectly composed. Because inequality has to be smashed, the Law established in the capital would address each citizen, regardless of his social background, of his geographical location, of his ethnical origins. The obsession of the hardest revolutionary men (belonging to the Jacobin club) to enforce centralization throws into relief their will to create a uniform territory where equal people would live in harmony. During those times, homogeneity and uniformity were the only words which were linked with equality; for those leaders, men could not be equal if still different.

This system had a key advantage: whoever you were, you had a real chance to become a French citizen if you expressed your eagerness to be part of this political community. Let us analyze for instance the first revolutionary constitutions[3]: in order to become French, a foreigner settled in France could become a citizen and could win his naturalization by marrying a French woman, adopting a French child, or taking care of a French elderly person. If you were born on the French soil, you were entitled to ask for the French citizenship[4]. Those examples underline that becoming part of the nation was only a question of will, and not a question of origins, religions. The Declaration of Human Rights and of the Citizens Rights made on the 26^th of August 1789 stated that each citizen benefited from a complete freedom in worship and thoughts. To sump up, the law did not care about private and individuals particularities, but regards people as equal citizens who had to behave in public accordingly to the Law they have chosen.

Unfortunately, the French revolution was brought to an end by the creation of the Napoleonan Empire and, in 1815, by the re-establishment of the monarchy. There is no doubt that the French Revolution was the period when the ideals composing the basis of the French model were claimed. However, it was not the period when they were really and efficiently enforced. In 1875, after a hard fight between the defenders of the Empire, the supporters of the monarchy and the upholders of the Republic, the longest and strongest regime was instored in France, the third Republic[5]. Because of the struggle they had to face before coming to power, the republican leaders in 1877 decided to establish a solid republic whose model would be strong enough to gain the adherence of the whole population. Under the third republic, what has become the well-known slogan of the French republic was modelled: “liberty, equality, fraternity”. This triptych represents the paramount principles which had to be enforced, through several ways: the equality of chances thanks to the free public school, the masculine universal suffrage, all individual and common freedoms. In order to calm down the political tensions coming from twenty years of authoritarian regime[6], the new republic had to create, or re-create a system of values, of principles the French people could identify with, a model they would be tempted to respect and support. In order to shape good citizens, defenders of the young and fragile republic, leaders like Jules Ferry understood that the best way of achieving their goal was to “seduce” the new generations, hence the efforts made on the educational field. Each child was obliged to go to primary school where classes about citizenship, moral and French history were delivered by a professional and highly involved body of teachers, dubbed ironically the “hussars of the republic”[7] in allusion to their commitment to the ideals of the new regime. The efforts of the new leaders were successful, and actually were so successful that they made the previous master of knowledge worry: the Church.

Indeed, before the third republic, the clergy had a monopole on the school, and, as a result, beneficiate from a solid influence in people’s mind which they contributed to shape. With the new republican regime, the Church was losing one of its main advantage, the exclusiveness of knowledge and the control on children’s mind; the Church was teaching how to become a good Christian; the republican school was training children to behave like good citizens. Besides, the Church was all the more hostile to the new regime since it had for a long time supported the monarchy, (the famous “alliance between the throne and the altar”), and had persuaded the church-goers not to uphold the new regime. As a result the first decades of the establishment of the republic were ribbed by a continuous struggle between two rival institutions, the new republic and the Church. In order to create an independent and strong republic the political world had to do away with the influence of the clergy, which was discretely defending the traditional authoritarian forces. The French state had no choice but to build itself against the Church. The violence of this opposition may explain the emergence of the notion of secularism at the beginning of the third republic, what was called the “laicité”, a value which has become as important as the three ones previously evoked. This deep polemic was dividing the society in two radically opposed sides, the religious people and the republican ones. In 1905, a law rooted the definitive separation between the State and the Church, separating the ecclesiastical goods from the public ones; cases of discrimination against catholic members were disclosed and provoked scandals[8]. In order to calm down the issue, private religious beliefs had to be confined to the private sphere, and had to be hidden; in the public area, nothing had to distinguish a religious person from another. Hence the implementation of secularism in school: signs of personal belonging to any worship were forbidden. One cannot but conclude that the first religious group threatening the republic were Catholics; for a long time, they either refused to vote, or voted in a very conservative and traditional way; diplomatic relationships with the Vatican were broken in 1904. Yet, this radical solution was not the most efficient way to rally the whole population to the republic; in the 1910’s, many efforts were made by the republic to allay the defiance of the Catholics. Step by step, the latter began to accept the republic, voting, even creating their own republican party. One has to keep in mind that what would become the traditional respect of secularism was originally meant to protect the minority group from a discrimination stemming from a few radical authorities.

Can we speak of a persistence today of the model we have evoked, of the clinging to the four main values of the Republican Pact, liberty, equality, brotherhood and secularism? There is no denying that the general pattern aims at remaining the same; in order to illustrate the prevalence of the logic of secularism, the denial of ethnical and religious origins as relevant issues, one could mention the still ongoing interdiction to broadcast and publish statistics based on the racial or religious origins of people; as a result, it is theoretically impossible to know how many Muslims France outnumbers[9]. It would be, and it is, radically impossible to determine the percentage of the population born in France but having for parents North-African immigrants. In the spirit of the French model of integration, not only are those statistics useless (since those people have become French, have integrated the society, and so are not supposed to be different citizens from the other ones); they are also dangerous, in the sense that they could enhance some divisions of the society, some differences in the social community, and we know how hard the Republic has tried to erase all social differences in its past actions, when difference was synonymous with inequality. Because all citizens are equal, they must abide by the same general law hence the recent interdiction by the Republic of opening religious tribunals which would have subtracted a fringe of the population from the most awed Law. In November 2005 Joseph Stiruck, the Great Rabbi of France, had expressed his intention of creating a Jewish law court in order to decide on individuals and private dilemmas having an impact on Jewish worship, claiming that the Jewish community should be allowed to “solve our problems ourselves”. With indignation, his proposal was rejected, and his objective was accused of undermining the fundamental base of the Republic, equality of all the citizens in front of the same secular Law. Not most important, but much more debated, the issue over the wearing of the scarf in public schools (while the female pupils are under 18) was often pinpointed as the obvious proof of the persistence of the spirit of the French model of integration : strict equality and secularism. This controversial issue was set up by a group of Islamic girls who refused to take off their veil while going to public schools, in spite of a very ancient law forbidding anyone from displaying signs of religious identity. In front of what was perceived as a threat on the ideals of the republic, of the notion of equality, of secularism, the government prepared a law, enforced in September 2004, which reaffirmed the interdiction of wearing ostensible signs of religious belongings in public schools. After the vote of this law by the parliament, 47 young girls were excluded from high schools for not abiding by the rule, whereas 550 similar cases managed to be solved through dialogue and persuasion. France was much criticized for this regulation; in Iran, a “fatwa” was edited against France, on grounds that this new rule was directed against Muslims, and threatens the liberty of worship promised in the preamble of the Constitution. Yet, in the political class, the intention was all the contrary, the aim was first and foremost to diminish the barriers between communities, to apply the principle of secularism and ease integration; to be honest, another goal was also to diminish the Islamic pressure on young girls, who, in numerous cases, had not chosen to wear the scarf but had been obliged to do so under pressure from their family. Behind the question of secularism, the issue at stake was also the notion of equality between men and women, at least in the public area where the State is supposed to be the guarantee of this core principle. In the private sphere, in the middle of the street, in the mosque, never has the French Republic stepped in, for those horizons belong to private initiative, and are the refuge of individual liberties, including freedom of worship. Indeed the two worlds are clearly distinguished in the French model: in the public schools, funded by the State, belonging to the Republic, everybody has to accept the general rule. For those who, for a reason or another, cannot respect those laws, the possibility of resorting to private schools still exists; numerous catholic high schools are present throughout the territory, as well as Jewish centres and, since a couple of years, some very inexpensive Muslim schools. Here, pupils strictly obey special rules and can be given the religious knowledge their parents want them to have.

In order to conclude on the history of the French model of integration, one cannot but admit that at the origins, this system relies on a quite optimist conception of assimilation, hoping that no differences of richness, religion and race would ever divide a brotherly society, whose members daily express their longing for a commune existence and a shared political prospect; hence the emphasis which has been laid on the notion of strict equality and secularism. This model seems to have fully worked out at the beginning of the XXth century, once the third republic had managed to integrate both the Italian, Belgian and Polish immigrants on one side and the Catholic believers on the other sides. This model, which has been accurate and efficient for a century, is said to be out of breath today. The various explanations accounting for this crisis will constitute the topic of the next article.

[1] Becoming from the Latin worlds : « priva leges » : private laws, or laws which were only prevailing on a special group of people.

[2] Reference to the monarchy and the political and social regimes based on legal inequality before 1789.

[3] The first three ones were successively voted in 1791, 1793, 1795.

[4] The so-called « right of land » which has been many times opposed to the “right of blood” enforced under the German regimes for instance.

[5] 1875-1940.

[6] The second Empire, 1851-1871, was ruled by Napoleon the third, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.

[7] The hussars were Austrians military fighters ; the reference to those men was meant to underline that the teachers was the spire head of the new regime.

[8] See the case of the lists of practicing catholic civil servants made by M. Combes minister in 1903.

[9] However, as usual, many indirect means help the researchers to deliver a close perception of reality in spite of the general interdiction: around 5 millions of Muslims are today in France, against 45 million of baptised Catholics, for a general population of 62 million people. Accordingly to those figures, Islam is the second religion in France.

Aurélie Castel is a junior from Sciences Po, in Paris, France. She is majoring in Politics.