Contemporary Laïcité: Setting the Terms of a New Social Contract? The Slow Exclusion of Women Wearing Headscarves

Abstract

Abstract Over recent decades, France has had to deal with the growing presence of immigrants from its ex‐colonies – a phenomenon that has been affecting many former colonial powers and accentuated by globalisation. Starting in the late 1980s, this presence translated itself, among other things, through an increased visibility of Islam. For instance, numbers of second‐ and third‐generation Muslim women, primarily of North African origin, have been expressing their religiosity by wearing a headscarf in the public sphere. Many members of the French state and society have perceived this as a threat to the secular settlement, as they understand the headscarf to be a sign indicating that the believer's first allegiance does not lie with the secular nation state, but with God and with a religious community (the ummah) that transcends national borders. This article argues that the headscarf controversy in France has been a way for the French secular state and elites to reinforce a certain exclusive understanding of laïcité (secularism), as being more than a legal principle, which symbolises an ethic of collective life. This ethic succeeds in becoming stronger and more tangible because it is able to convey a sense of who can be included, and who has to be excluded from collective life. In this case women wearing headscarves have been identified as incapable of protecting and fostering Republican values while, in addition, also representing an external threat. They have therefore been slowly excluded from partaking in the activities of the polis, and deprived from enjoying their full citizenship rights' and duties. To conduct this investigation, the article takes the March 2004 law banning visible religious symbols in public schools as a starting point, and analyses how from then onwards petitions, law proposals and governmental reports have recommended, in the name of laïcité, excluding headscarf wearers from a variety of public spaces.