FRENCH SECULARISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA: THEORY AND

PRACTICES

ABSTRACT

France is knowing a current rising identity crisis crystallised around immigration and
Islam. The notions of the French Nation, Republicanism, and French Secularism, namely
laicité, emerged through history since the 1870s and kept on being recontextualized over
time. Close from the slippage from the Parliamentarian regime to the Presidential system,
the normative ‘one and indivisible’ French Republicanism has been reinterpreted into Neo-
Republican practices of a community gathered around imaginary Judeo-Christian cultural
values in political and media discourses. From this recontextualization has followed a
slippage from the normative inclusive laicité to an extremist reinterpretation of the Law as
an exclusive laicism targeting Islam and Muslim French citizens. Emerging from a fear of
communautarisme enshrined in an international context of tensions and terrorism since the
Iranian Revolution, the political discourses tend to be transcribed into the legal norm
through the erection of Laws banning the veil in schools, the burqa , and the burqini. These
harsh policies, which run counter to the secularist state’s duty of indifference regarding
religions as enunciated in the 1905 Law on the Separation between the State and the
Church, have nevertheless been reinforced since COVID-19 with the Laws on Separatism
and Global Security. Rooted in and recalling colonial and civilising mission ideologies,
these practices and their transcriptions into the legal norm are nevertheless hard to
denunciate as Islamophobic as long as the French Republic does not recognise any Race
leading to and emerging from schizophrenic political discourses against an ‘Islamo Leftism’
political body with secret political ambitions.

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INTRODUCTION

‘Is Laicism … becoming the sign and the justification of an identarian retreat?’
(Bauberot, 2015, cited in Prades, 2019).

Today, our globalized world is ironically witnessing the rise of populism and
intolerance at the international level. The question of racism and the relationship
between race and religion are recurrent issues in public debates but are still complex in
France. Indeed, The French Republican model in its conception of the Nation is very
particular. Emerging in the context of the 1870 Franco-Prussian conflict, it reflects the
need to unify the nation into a 'one nation and indivisible Nation' without the State
recognizing any community-based identity (i.e. race) but the juridic and social status.
This color-blindness echoes and reinforces the universalistic aspiration of the French
Revolution. However, the idea of the citizenry united in its loyalty to the Republic is re-
signified into a concurrence between allegiances. The fear of ‘communautarisme’
(communitarianism) in the context of international security tensions led to a Nation
Crisis articulated around the question of the ‘French Identity’: how post-colonial France
and its resulting multiculturalism can become blind to cultural and religious differences?
To what extent does Islam in the international context challenge these conceptions?
This identity crisis led to slippage to neo republicanism on which a new definition of
laicité (i.e. laicism) emerged. Like the difference made between the French political
system and the legal regime, these developments reflect a difference between the
theory of the law, expressed in the French Constitution and the 1905 Law, and the
practice of political discourse aiming to change the legal norm. The principle of laicité
becomes a value through a process of cultural resignification. Hence, political discourse
and practices led to the rising exclusion of French Muslims, the ‘Other’, through polemic

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debates suspecting Islam to have political ambitions. Expressed in strategic political and
media debates, the Muslim representation becomes a symbolic threat to the French
Secular Nation. The veil, burkini, and burqa cases, as the Global Security and
Separatism Laws, are the practical expressions of this new and exclusionary
secularism. But since republican universalism refutes all forms of racial distinctions, how
can racist discrimination be admitted? (Fassin et al., 2005). Its denial is in fact, another
expression of its existence.

Considering racism as a ‘generalized valuing of differences to justify aggression’
(Albert Memmi, cited in Fassin et al., 2006); this essay argues that the practical
reinterpretation of the notion of laicité into a ‘French hardcore secularism’ (Roy, 2007)
enshrined in a political agenda and discourses has led to discriminatory and
exclusionary derives of the ‘Other’, legitimized by an imaginary French nation.
This essay is built into three parts interacting with each other, with the gap
between theory and practice as a common thread. Redefining the complexity of French
notions of nationhood and secularism (I) allows us to shed light on reactionary and
counter-revolutionary political practices that aim to change the legal norm (II) and that
are expressions of a global French political discourse both racializing and politicizing
Muslims (III).

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Nation and laicité: a French complexity

French Nation ideology and Neo-Republicanism

The Republican model in its conception of the Nation is very particular to France.
The Nation à la française emerged in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian conflict context
over the acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine. The conflict is the expression of two
opposed conceptions of the nation: a universalist and republican French conception,
and a German conception that attributed citizenship to ‘race’. (i.e. a common culture
and language). There was a necessity for France, in its race for Alsace and Lorraine, to
advocate for universalism and citizenship attached to belonging. The Nation of the
French Republic was to be conceived through a universalist ideology of a ‘one and
indivisible’ Nation. As a result, no distinction was to be made between French citizens,
in that they are in their essence most human. There were to be no racial distinctions,
each French citizen was first and foremost a citizen by his link to the Republic and his
human nature. The republican model, therefore, invisibles the origins of each individual.
Hence, no ‘race’ is recognized in the legal system for the sake of equality (Scott, 2007).
On the contrary, it is based on a model of integration into the Nation-State to build an
‘Us’ National (Shcoettl, 2021). The community was based on the attachment of the
citizens to the Republic’s values. In this sense, there is no mention of the exclusion of
some citizens because of ethnic, socio, or religious affiliations in legal texts.

However, a shift is operated in the 1970s and the Republican tradition is
reinterpreted in the political discourses. The Nation is no more ‘simply a collection of
citizens with individuality, it is a community’ (Circulaire Ministérielle n35, 29/09/94, cited

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in Scott, 2007). Through fear of communautarisme (i.e. communitarianism) about
terrorism, the loyalty to Republic must not be rivalled by any other allegiances (Nicolet,
1982, cited in Almeida, 2019). Targeting Islam, ‘Neo-Republicanism’ (Almeida, 2019) is
constructed as the hegemonic rise of an exclusionist understanding of Republicanism
(Mondon, 2015), in opposition to the prevalent representation of multiculturalism.
Legally, the no racial distinctions do not legitimize exclusion of a specific community. In
practice, it will be argued that the construction of the ‘Other’ led to its exclusion. This
exclusionist understanding is to be translated into an extremist vision of laicité, which
will be called here ‘laicism’.

French secularism and laicism

In the legal framework, the notion of laicité is enshrined within three bodies of
law: The declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), reiterated in the
Preamble of the French Constitution (1948), and the ‘Law on the separation of Church
and State’ (1905). French neo republicanism manifests itself into a reinterpretation of
laicité (i.e. French Secularism) as enshrined in the ‘Loi sur la séparation de l’Église et
de l’État’ of 1905 (i.e. Law on the separation of church and state), in reaction to Muslim
practices (Prades, 2019).

Historically, the law emerged in a context of the necessary distance between
church and state and resulted in many years of debates. Resulting in a compromise: the
Jaures’ separatist and inclusive version of Secularism, i.e. Laicité, is institutionalized.
Even though the term laicité is not directly enshrined in this law, it is a procedural
interpretation that emphasizes freedom of conscience and the free exercise of religion,

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framed by the neutrality of the state (Almeida, 2018). Indeed, Art.’1 ‘guarantees the free
exercise of worship under the only restrictions of enaction hereafter in the interest of
public order’. Moreover, laicité is recognized as an essential attribute of the Republic:
‘France is one and indivisible Republic, secular, democratic and social’ (Art.1, French
Constitution of 1958, cited in Schoettl, 2021). In this sense, the legal framework of
laicité implies the freedom of conscience in private space (i.e. State cannot interfere),
the freedom of cult in private and public space as long as ‘their demonstration does not
disturb the public order established by law’ (Art. X, Declaration of the Rights of Man and
the Citizen), and the freedom to express opinions and beliefs in spaces of general
interest. In the legal framework, State has then the duty of indifference regarding beliefs
and origins. In practice, the notion of public order is used to restrain Islamic public
practices. This practice, therefore, differentiates the Muslim community from the whole
citizenry, thus violating the right to indifference.

In relation to the 1970s deep change to ‘neo republicanism’ (Chabal, 2015, cited
in Almeida, 2018), and because this period was ‘marked by decline of religious beliefs
and practices in modern societies, often posted as universal, human, and
developmental process’ (Casanova, 2006, cited in Prades, 2019), a slippage in the
conception of laicité is operated and the principle goes beyond the legal framework.
This new laicité that aims to reframe the meaning and extent of laicité is centered on
Islam, its place in society, and its relation to the State. Laicism (i.e. laicité exclusionary)
becomes the new normative definition of laicité in political discourse (Ebrahim, 2020).
According to Fourest et Venner, leaders in the promotion of this new secularism,
genuine laicism is not one in which the state merely guarantees equal treatment
between religions. The framework of the state is no longer restricted to neutrality and
equality. This reinterpretation maximizes the legal principle of laicité to the extreme, i.e.

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laicism, with a State that must interfere in religious practices especially when public.
This construction relies on the laicité as discrétionniste (i.e. behavioral norm), which is
defined through ‘collective disciplines crystallized in France since the 20 th Century’
(Schoettl, 2021), and which rejects religion into the private sphere. It is the French
customary principle of faire société (i.e. making society) through what unites individuals
rather than what differentiates and so divides them.

In this sense, State is now depicted with the duty to interfere with religious public
demonstrations to protect its citizens from an Islam with imaginary political ambitions, as
it protected its citizens from an overbearing Church. It is the submission of the religion
to politics (Roy, 2007) to reconfigure Islam to fit its context through assimilation. To
‘make’ the ‘Muslim French’ who practices Islam as a French citizen (Fernando and
Durham, 2014). In this imaginary, Islam has to be reformed for Muslims to be full
citizens (Meziane, 2021).

**

The ideological evolutions of the notion of Nation and secularism to an extreme
vision induced a slippage from the legal norm to the practice as a political value.

**

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Laicité from a legal norm to an anti-Islamic political value:
Counter-revolutionary reactions policing Islam

Les affaires du voile, burkini and terrorism

The slippage in the ideology is expressed through its reactionary practice in
several cases in the context of a harsh position on immigration. Indeed, the ‘affairs of
the veil’ (Scott, 2007) mark the turning point in the conception of laicité from 1989 to the
2004 Law banning headscarves in school. Through the political discourse against the
veil in School, these affairs unveil the distrust and mistrust of the veil around which the
representation of Islam (as a religion and a political project) crystallizes (Tolan, 2017).
The veil is depicted in political discourses as ‘inimical’ to French Law, violating the Law
of 1905, and incompatible with the ‘one and indivisible’ Nation. Banning the headscarf is
a symbolic gesture against a symbolic threat to Nation integrity and harmony (Scott,
2007) to ‘maintain public order’ which is a modality of normative laicité. The ‘maintain of
public order’ is misused to serve a political ideology aiming to restrain public
representation of Islam. Therefore, these political speeches reflect a misunderstanding
of the legal concepts of nationhood and secularism and are based, on their own
reinterpretation of the law. It is in this sense that the Conseil d'Etat (i.e. State Council)
reaffirmed in 1989, during the first case of the veil, that students’ religious signs were
not incompatible with laicité. While Conseil d’Etat reaffirmed that banning the headscarf
would result in a violation of the freedom of individual conscience, Lionel Jospin
(Minister of Education) left the decision to the local school’s discretion. Moreover, during
the second affair of the veil (1994), a decree was promoted by Francois Bayrou
(Minister of Education) banning ostentatious signs of religion at school. Once again the
Conseil d'Etat reaffirmed its previous prerogatives. The latter being the legal and

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jurisdictional advisor to the government in the preparation of legislation, the gap
between the theory of the law and the political practices emerging from ideological
reinterpretation is well shown. During the last veil controversy in 2003, the STASI’s
(commission set up to reflect upon the application of the laicité principle) report stated
for an outlawing of ‘conspicuous’ religious signs in public schools combined with other
recommendations to end the marginalization of Muslim and ‘integrate’ them to France.
The political discourse ideology becomes the legal norm. The 2004 Chirac Law banned
definitely ‘conspicuous’ religious signs – which in fact targeted the veil – in public
schools. The ban is restricted to the very specific cadre of school, however, the
symbolic remains great: even though public school emerged from Jules ferry Law
(1881-1882), the 1948 5 th Republic took it back as a representation of the French
Nation, the place where the citizenry is instilled. Symbolically, the Nation values banned
headscarves.

However, the burkini controversy demonstrated religious signs notably Islamic
ones were acceptable in public spaces. Born in the 2015-2016 context of terrorism in
France, several coastal cities enacted decrees to ban the burkini on the beach. They
argued for the maintenance of ‘public order’ against ‘ostentatious display of religion’ for
security and hygiene reasons. More deeply, the decrees relied on an erroneous
conception of the principle of laicité regarding the Law, describing a religious outfit as a
matter of public order. Hence, after 6 months of debate, they have all been ruled illegal
by the Conseil d’Etat as going against freedoms of movement, conscience, and
personal liberty (Tolan, 2017). The rescale in Law by the legal Institutions demonstrates
the misconception of political actors in terms of laicité. It shows the gap between their
practical conceptions, based on the imaginary maintenance of public order and security
defense against Islamic fundamentalism, and the theoretical definition of laicité based

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on a legal framework. It is the practical manifestation of the slippage of laicité regarding
the Republican difficulties to adapt to post-colonial multiculturalism.

Colonial roots, racial exclusion, and civilization idea

Indeed, the political actors rely on ‘a process of cultural resignification through
which a specific garment was dissociated from its context and recontextualized as a
symbol of subversive collective action’ (Almeida, 2018). The veil, burqa, and burkini are
erected as symbols of a violent and barbaric Islam enemy of Western civilization. The
simple piece of cloth becomes a symbol of religious fundamentalism, oppressor of
women, and political conqueror against which the French Nation must defend its unity.
The headscarf is in the collective imaginary of the political discourse the representation
of the ‘Other’ based on a State racism as a fundamental mechanism of the modern
state (Foucault, 1976). Hence, it becomes the representation of a whole homogenous
culture opposed to the French values and cultural laicism. In the imaginary, the French
Secular way of life (i.e. cultural interpretation) is threatened by fundamentalists and
political leaders have to react. Laws on the veil then appear as a means of defense
where the ‘Muslim problem’ questions the National Identity. Outlawing the veil unveils
the need to assimilate Muslims into French citizenry (Scott, 2007). In this sense, there is
the necessity to ‘educate‘ French Muslims, to civilize them for them to be finally able to
be full citizens, which reflects the continuity of the Kantian ‘civilizing idea’. The colonial
‘civilizing mission’ is expressed through ‘the emancipatory mission of the Republic’
(Besson, 2010, cited in Mondon, 2015). It echoes to the French colony of Algeria’s
ideology where Islam was under the management of the French State (Scott, 2007) and
so the legal principle of laicité was not exported to. On the one hand, banning the veil

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denies the capacity of self-determination of Muslim individuals in the same racist
ideology of imperialistic powers controlling and domesticating Muslims as they would
not understand the law (Tolan, 2017). On the other hand, the establishment by
President Francois Hollande in 2016 of the Foundation for the Islam of France with Jean
Pierre Chevenement at its head may question the principle of colonial hierarchy: the
Islam of France is governed by a French institution that aims to make Islam recognizing
Republican principles with a non-Muslim at its head.

The secular policing of Islam (Meziane, 2021) that relies on biopower
mechanisms increased all the more since the COVID-19 pandemic with its public
expression in Law: Etat d’urgence, Loi Sécurité Globale, Loi sur le Séparatisme. The
Law on Separatism of the French ‘colonial modernity’ (Meziane, 2021) includes police of
the cults (art. 25 to 36) showing how actual laicism does not lie in the 1905 spirit but on
a socially accepted representation of French secularism as a response to identity and
security imagined challenges posed by Islam. Laicité is then rebuilt into a defensive
provision against military and identarian insecurities (Prades, 2019). As a result, these
practices have to be seen as counter-revolutionary reactions to multi-culturalism in the
sense that laicité is no more understood as a social contract emerging from law and
provisions relying on strict separatism and inclusive separation. On the contrary, they
are political reactions that rely on laicism understood as a French cultural value of old
civil religions with a State intervening against religion rather than being blind and
neutral. Through these new legal provisions, the State recognizes and organizes the
cults like the old Gallican version of laicité (Bauberot, 2015, cited in Prades, 2019).

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***

The political practices targeting Islam have to be seen as a sociocultural
reinterpretation of the legal laicité of 1905. It provoked a slippage from an inclusive
laicité to exclusive laicism which results in new restrictive laws. Those stemmed from
Islamophobic political discourses that reshaped the French political and intellectual
landscape (Roy, 2007).

***

A political discourse

Construction of the ‘Other’

The reactions to identarian and security challenges are constructed through
political discourses and controversies of an Orientalist vision 1 (Topolski, 2018). French
Muslims are built into a threatening, irrational, and misogynist homogenized outgroup
with political ambitions. This new conception of laicité is expressed in debates over a
symbolic expression of Islam. Indeed, Muslims ‘differences’ with the Western culture are
exacerbated through discourses defining them as a communitarian group incompatible
with the myth of French Judeo-Christian culture: ‘Our French roots are Judeo-Christian’
(Morano, 2009, cited in Fernando and Durham, 2014). In this sense, Muslims are built
into a socio-cultural category excluded – an outgroup - from the values of the French
1 ‘Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the
familiar (Europe, the West, ‘Us’) and the strange (Orient, the lost, ‘Them’)’ (Said, 1979, cited in Topolski, 2018)

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citizenry if they do not educate themselves and get civilized enough to attempt it. There
is France, and Muslim, the ‘Other’ (Ebrahimi, 2020). This construction relies on the very
mechanisms of the modern state (i.e. ‘Biopower’), with State racism as a necessary
element to protect its citizens (Foucault, 1976). Muslims are described as the enemy of
the Nation, a new form of totalitarianism that tries to impose its barbaric fundamentalist
vision and practices on France. This construction is built on political discourses by
politics, media, and new philosophers. They fabricated an etymology based on a
misunderstood principle of laicité leading to the erection of a ‘secular state of race’
(Mezione, 2021).

How is it that the media and political counter-discourses do not talk about
Islamophobia? Islamophobia is the most contested term used in French discourses and
is denied to reject the possibility of the construction of the ‘otherness’ and the
denunciation of practices of discrimination (Ebrahimi, 2020). it relies on a strategy of
‘Islamophobic denial’ (Ebrahimi, 2020) through racist anti-racist discourse (Fassin et al.,
2006). First, how French discourses could recognize any kind of racism when the
Republican ideology does not recognize any race? In this sense talking about
islamophobia would actually reflect a political color often denunciated as ‘Islamo-
Gauchisme’ (i.e. Islamo-Leftism) as a sort of new ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ (Mbembe, 2019)
to reflect the obscurantism thinking of an old fundamentalist Islam combined with left
extremism. Secondly, as the republican ideology is so complex, racism and anti-racism
tend to merge in different forms. What racism and what anti-racism?

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The Racist anti-racist discourse: Islamophobia denial

If racism denial as a racist practice is an occurring practice (Van Djik, cited in
Ebrahimi, 2020), French Islamophobia denial is very particular. The principle of the
French Nation allows to denial of Islamophobic practices in political discourses. It is a
political strategy used by the elite to maintain a positive representation of France
(Ebrahimi, 2020). They use a transfer of the victimhood strategy: ‘practices excluding
Islam are not racist, in fact, Muslims are racists because of their communitarianism’.
This rhetoric challenges the legitimacy of proper anti-racist discourses so Islamophobia
cannot exist but the denunciation is racist. The critique of race is delegitimized.
Moreover, laicism provides the language and political framework to deny Islamophobia.
Talking about Islamophobia would then be against the new laicité and freedom of
speech. Two birds one stone, it allows the ‘New philosophers’ (e.g. Finkielkraut,
Bruckner, Fourest, and Venner) (Ebrahim, 2020) to justify these excluding practices by
disputing the term of Islamophobia, as well as accusing the Muslim community of
extremism. Muslims cannot be demonized as assailants and victims at the same time.
In Pro Choix, Caroline Fourest and Fammienta Verner denounce an Islamic conspiracy
from Iran against France to justify the headscarf ban in school as well as rejecting the
practical existence of Islamophobia. They compared the Iranian Ayatollah's invocation
of Islamophobia during the Iranian revolution when some women refused to wear the
veil to the denunciation of Islamophobia in France. This rhetoric links Islamophobia’s
claim to Islamic fundamentalism to delegitimize it. This argument was actually taken up
later by Bruckner 2 and Emmanuel Valls (Prime Minister). Moreover, these new
philosophers linked the Islamic revolution, Islamophobia’s French claims, and the
‘Londonistan’ theory 3 to depict a broader Islamic project against gender equality and
2 In his book ‘An imaginary racism’ (2017)

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freedom of speech. Indeed, the freedom of blasphemy as a secular principle is often
erected to legitimize Islamophobic political discourses and to reject their own
Islamophobia. They argue their discourses are simply criticisms against Islam which are
permitted by the 1881 Law on the ban of Blasphemy. In this ideology, claiming against
Islamophobia is bringing blasphemy laws back to life into a secular fatwa. Following this
reflection, sustaining denunciations of Islamophobia would reflect the ‘Islamo-leftism’
political color’.

The Racist anti-racist discourse: Racism without Race

Accusing Islamo-leftism any person denunciating Islamophobia allows Racism
without Race (Fassin, 2006). Indeed, it transforms a religious community into a political
body. Combined with the French non-recognition of race, the possibility of talking about
Islamophobia is obsolete, and Islamophobic discourses and practices are legitimized.

Developed in ‘the New Judeophobia’ by Pierre-André Taguieff (2010, cited in
Ebrahimi 2020), it sets up the notion of radical Islamism expressed by a hatred of Jews
and Israel. On the one hand, this notion is based on the necessarily radical character of
Islam, linked to a political party, to depict Islam as an invading force external to
European culture. Making advocate of Islamophobia from an obscurantist left. ‘Left is
working with Arab states to bring about the Islamization of Europe, or Eurobia’ (Bat
Ye’Or, cited in Ebrahimi, 2020). In this sense, French Muslims do not deserve state
protection. On the other hand, it includes the question of Israel and antisemitism. First,

3 The belief that there is a strong foothold of Islamic radical fundamentalism in the region of London.

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by accusing a whole community of antisemitism, and second by competition of
victimhood. ‘Holocaust is a unique event that transcends history’ (Wiesel, 1967): Jews
lived real racism, Muslims cannot compare or it would be a fraud. This competition on
memory aims to reduce Muslim suffering as not legitimate. Moreover, the positions of
French Muslims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would reflect their antisemitism.
French political discourses and new Laws targeting Islam are not racist but/because
Muslims are the real racist. Today's anti-racism is seen as yesterday's racism. The
confusion of terms is therefore great in political discourse. National universalism is
therefore largely paradoxical. Universalism and laicité can thus be both racist and anti-
racist political weapons (Fassin, 2006). To say the same thing, it is sometimes
necessary to say its opposite. Moreover, these racist or anti-racist discourses of
intellectuals vary according to the context and serve political interests. We see the
emergence of the racialization of the nation in the mouths of 'intellectuals' such as
Finkielkraut. A shift is operated from a critique of anti-racism to fight racism to a critique
of xenophobic and Islamophobic anti-racism, particularly since the attacks of 11
September 2001 and the tensions resulting from the 2015 French terrorism context.

****

In theory, Laicité, stemming from the principles of the French Nation is inclusive and not
exclusionary. The aim of this essay was to show the French Nation theoretically does
not recognize ethnic and religious distinctions between citizens, it only recognizes their
human essence and their attachment to the Republic. However, political discourse aims
to change the legal norm. In political discourses, Neo-republicanism tends to define
attachment to the republic as an obligation to respect the French cultural norm in order
to be recognized as a citizen. Based on imagined cultural French values, the Nation

17

excludes the ‘Other’. Laicité followed this new principle and became in the imaginary, an
exclusive principle for those who do not meet the criteria norms of an imagined Judeo-
Christian Society. The Muslim is constructed as the ‘Other’ through the frightening
invader of French civilized values reinforced by the rise of populism that stands against
immigration. Paradoxically, Muslims are racialized into a whole community target, but at
the same time, they are no more depicted as a religious community but as a frightening
and invading political body, legitimizing Islamophobic discourses.

The French political and media discourse does not speak of Islamophobia, but it
is very present and is based on the notions of Nation and French laicism. According to
Didier Fassin (2006), this "embarrassment in designating the realities of the racial
question" should be seen as an answer, because it forces us to think. Through this
embarrassment, the discourse reveals what it would like to hide, that is, the realities of
the racial question and its discrimination in the French Republic that invisibles religions
and origins.

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