The French government has created an office of laicité in an effort to better control how state secularism – one of the fundamental values of the French Republic – is taught and transmitted.
The Interministerial Committee replaces the Observatoire de la Laicité, which was criticised for not cracking down hard enough on radical Islam.
“There have been many theoretical debates and controversies for many years. Now it is time to act,” Marlène Schiappa, France’s junior minister in charge of citizenship, told French public radio on Thursday.
She is one of about a dozen ministers in the new Committee that will be tasked with coordinating laicité – state secularism, and track the implementation of the so-called separatism law, aimed at cracking down on Islamic extremism, and which is expected to be approved by parliament on 22 July.
The Committee will operate under the auspices of the Interior Ministry and supersede the Observatoire, an independent public watchdog put in place in 2013 by then-President Francois Hollande.
It has come under criticism over the years, and most recently from Schiappa, for being too accommodating to Muslims, and too lax in addressing radical Islam.
Led by a former Socialist MP, Jean-Louis Bianco, the Observatoire’s mission was to train public employees and advise the government on laicité.
“What was criticised was its independence … its political line. Some found it too open,” said Hakim El Karaoui, a researcher with the Institut Montaigne think tank who has advised President Emmanuel Macron on Islam.
Different shades of laicité
The concept of laicité comes from the 1905 law separating church and state, which says that the state is neutral with regard to religion, but also lets people believe what they want.
The word, and concept, of laicité does not appear in the law, so it has been interpreted in different ways.
“For some – which is the case with the Observatorire – laicité is a legal concept of state neutrality and freedom of conscience,” said El Karaoui.
“For others it’s a political history: the conflict between first the Kings of France, then presidents, and religious authorities. At first it was with the Pope, and today it is with Islam,” El Karaoui explained.
“And then for some, laicité is atheism. They believe that religion is a dangerous and old-fashioned idea.”
The Observatoire became a target during the debate over the law against separatism, and in the wake of the murder of teacher Samuel Paty, who had shown caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in his class.
Schiappa criticised the Observatoire’s rapporteur, Nicolas Cadène, for publicly denouncing Islamophobia at the time, and for working with the CCIF Collective against Islamophobia, which was accused of being involved in hate speech and disbanded by the government after Paty’s murder.
During the debates over the anti-separatism law, Schiappa announced the dissolution of the Observatoire and its replacement with a new body.
“There are not 50 shades of laicité, and this new office will back only one, which is laicité in action,” she told the Journal de Dimanche newspaper.
Laicité training
One of the Interministerial Committee’s first undertakings will be to approve a new ‘Day of laicité’ on 9 December, the date of the 1905 law separating church and state.
The Committee will also take over laicité training for public employees, with the goal of providing such training to all five million of them by 2025, with a particular focus on teachers, in the wake of Paty’s murder.
Paty murder puts focus on role of teachers in passing on French values
A recent study by the Jean Jaures think tank and the Ifop polling institute looked at teachers’ approach towards religion and laicité, and found that most have a “minimalist” interpretation.
“Their rejection of an ‘anti-religious’ concept of laicité can be seen in the small number of teachers who now see it as a tool to fight against the influence of religion in society,” wrote François Kraus, who led the study for Ifop.
Younger teachers, in particular, are more comfortable than older teachers with expressions of religion in society, even if they are still very much in favour of a 2004 law banning religions signs in schools.
“Young teachers express an ‘open’ – some would say ‘inclusive’ – vision of laicité that appears close to Anglophone multicultural social models,” wrote Kraus.
This, he says, will have an impact on how future generations approach the concept in France.
Laicité specialists
The Observatoire had already started training programmes for public sector workers. El Karaoui says it makes sense to continue.
“It’s about teaching public employees what laicité is, what they are allowed and not allowed to do, how to behave with the public. And how to identify the risk of threats to laicité, and aggressions in the name of religion,” he added.
French debate on ‘secular values’ opens in a climate of political hostility
The new Committee will be tasked with placing a laicité ‘specialist’ in each public administration by the end of 2021 to provide information and mediate on issues relating to religion.
“We must support public workers, we should not leave them alone with difficult questions, which is why we need these specialists,” said public service minister Amélie de Montchalin on the right-wing Cnews channel on Wednesday.
The Committee will also oversee new powers given to prefects, the government’s representatives on the ground, to take legal action against local governments if they seem to contradict laicité, for example by allowing women-only sessions in public pools.
When the right-wing French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin declared in December of last year, “never at any given time is Allah superior to the Republic,” he meant it.
Now the French government has set up a new inter-ministerial committee on secularism that will evolve into the bureau of secularism in a move widely believed meant to teach Muslims to “love the Republic.”
In a lengthy Twitter thread by the “Committee for the prevention of crime and radicalisation,” a French government agency announcing the new committee declared that laicite is “first and foremost freedom.”
Laicite is a French brand of secularism that is austere and draconian. French politicians have increasingly used secularism as a tool to discriminate against the country’s growing Muslim population.
The proposals set out by the committee on secularism seeks to convince people, in particular Muslims, that only laicite protects different “cults” from practising their faith equally because the country has no official religion.
Despite not adopting France’s extreme version of secularism, countries like the United Kingdom (UK), which have no official separation between church and state, have a vibrant and free society where people of different faiths can practice their religious convictions.
In the UK, Christian priests sit in the Upper House of Parliament, also known as the House of Lords, make and debate laws. At the beginning of each legislative day, a Bishop reads a prayer. The UK is not, however, in danger of suddenly becoming a theocratic state.
“The secular Republic is indivisible: one cannot sort or separate the citizens, distinguish them according to their beliefs. The laicite makes us a single nation, not an addition of communities,” the new committee on secularism is set to propagate.
France, however, does have exceptions. For example, under the Concordat in Alsace-Moselle, the Strasbourg region of France is governed by a set of laws dating to 1801, which allows regional authorities to fund religious activities and makes religious education in schools compulsory.
While the rest of France abrogated the Concordat in 1905, signed initially under the Napoleonic period, the region of Strasbourg was under German control at that time.
When the region became part of France after World War I, those unique laws remained in force.
‘Emancipation of women’
The committee on secularism is also set to convince Muslim women that secularism is a “means of emancipation” and “women’s freedom” to choose how to practice their faith or lack thereof.
Following the announcement, some were quick to point out that in public schools, many Muslim girls have their freedom denied to wear what they want following the hijab ban in 2004.
Whereas others accused the government of using words that are often cliches of the far-right and “emancipating” women subject to conditions that it “does not apply to French and Muslim women who decide to cover their hair.”
As part of the proposals, the state will also deploy officials that will inspect local politicians and incite them to carry out secularist themed events.
The committee on secularism will also ratify the establishment of a “secularism day” on December 9, the anniversary of the law of 1905, which established secularism in France.
‘A joke’
Reactions to the proposal were widely mocked, with some calling the proposals a “big joke.”Some warned that the government’s claim that it was neutral towards religious matters was far from the truth.
“The neutrality of the state is no longer so when this state gets involved in affairs that do not concern it, like the Charter,” said one critic referring to the “Charter of Imams”, which the French President Emmanuel Macron has pushed in a bid to define an Islam of France.
The Charter was published in January, but with several Muslim organisations refusing to sign on – a crisis of legitimacy clouded its implementation.
The Charter would, among other things, forbid Muslims in mosques from criticising and denouncing state racism.
Under the proposals set forth by the committee on secularism, blaspheming and speaking out against a religion, which many believe is set to apply only to Muslims, is a vaunted and cherished right. Criticising the state, however, could be seen as a sign of extremism.
With the French presidential elections less than nine months away and Macron’s disapproval ratings hovering around 60 percent, the flurry of anti-Muslim proposals is a bid to take votes from the far-right.
France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen is ahead in the polls for the 2022 presidential elections and is known for her anti-Islam and anti-Muslim stances.
A key principle of the French state since its adoption in 1905, laïcité is poorly understood outside France, but the ideas of secularism are also often misunderstood – sometimes deliberately for political reasons – inside the country as well.
The basic principle of the law is that everyone in France is free to follow whatever religion they choose, but that the French state itself remains strictly neutral and religion plays no part in the business of the state.
This rules out, for example, Christmas nativity scenes in town halls or prayers in schools. It also means that agents of the state – anyone on the public payroll – cannot display any signs of their religion such as wearing the Muslim headscarf while at work, while religious symbols cannot be displayed in state buildings including schools.
It does not, however, extend to private businesses – so shops can and do put up Christmas decorations – or public spaces – so that wearing a Muslim scarf on the street or in a shop is perfectly legal.
Nevertheless, the lack of a simple, concise definition means that many people remain confused about the principle.
This is not helped by some deliberate distortions of the principle for political reasons, where it is particularly used to attack Muslim women.
When the right-wing French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin declared in December of last year, “never at any given time is Allah superior to the Republic,” he meant it.
Now the French government has set up a new inter-ministerial committee on secularism that will evolve into the bureau of secularism in a move widely believed meant to teach Muslims to “love the Republic.”
In a lengthy Twitter thread by the “Committee for the prevention of crime and radicalisation,” a French government agency announcing the new committee declared that laicite is “first and foremost freedom.”
Laicite is a French brand of secularism that is austere and draconian. French politicians have increasingly used secularism as a tool to discriminate against the country’s growing Muslim population.
The proposals set out by the committee on secularism seeks to convince people, in particular Muslims, that only laicite protects different “cults” from practising their faith equally because the country has no official religion.
Despite not adopting France’s extreme version of secularism, countries like the United Kingdom (UK), which have no official separation between church and state, have a vibrant and free society where people of different faiths can practice their religious convictions.
In the UK, Christian priests sit in the Upper House of Parliament, also known as the House of Lords, make and debate laws. At the beginning of each legislative day, a Bishop reads a prayer. The UK is not, however, in danger of suddenly becoming a theocratic state.
“The secular Republic is indivisible: one cannot sort or separate the citizens, distinguish them according to their beliefs. The laicite makes us a single nation, not an addition of communities,” the new committee on secularism is set to propagate.
France, however, does have exceptions. For example, under the Concordat in Alsace-Moselle, the Strasbourg region of France is governed by a set of laws dating to 1801, which allows regional authorities to fund religious activities and makes religious education in schools compulsory.
While the rest of France abrogated the Concordat in 1905, signed initially under the Napoleonic period, the region of Strasbourg was under German control at that time.
When the region became part of France after World War I, those unique laws remained in force.
‘Emancipation of women’
The committee on secularism is also set to convince Muslim women that secularism is a “means of emancipation” and “women’s freedom” to choose how to practice their faith or lack thereof.
Following the announcement, some were quick to point out that in public schools, many Muslim girls have their freedom denied to wear what they want following the hijab ban in 2004.
Whereas others accused the government of using words that are often cliches of the far-right and “emancipating” women subject to conditions that it “does not apply to French and Muslim women who decide to cover their hair.”
As part of the proposals, the state will also deploy officials that will inspect local politicians and incite them to carry out secularist themed events.
The committee on secularism will also ratify the establishment of a “secularism day” on December 9, the anniversary of the law of 1905, which established secularism in France.