In February 2014, a resident physician was fired from his position at a hospital in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris. The reason: his facial hair. The doctor, who is of Egyptian origin, wore a long beard which the hospital judged “religiously provocative.” The hospital asked him several times to shave his beard, complaining that it could be construed by employees and patients as a religious symbol; he was fired for refusing to shave. He decided to challenge his firing, taking his case to a Versailles appeals court. However, in December 2017, the appeals court sided with the hospital, upholding the doctor’s dismissal. The doctor, the court reasoned, had neglected to meet a necessary standard of secularism in his work by sporting a beard that could “ostensibly” be viewed as a symbol of religious affiliation.
The court’s logic might seem a bit bizarre. Why would a beard — which, in this incident, was apparently only 5 cm long — disqualify an individual from serving in the medical profession, and can a system with this result survive in a diversifying France?
Égalitė: How equal is it?
Like many aspects of modern France, the antecedent to this court case lies in the era of the French Revolution and the values it ingrained in the French national consciousness. The French Revolution, like the American war for independence, was a repudiation of monarchy and a commitment to the republican values of the Enlightenment, succinctly summarized in France’s national motto, “libertė, ėgalitė, fraternitė” (liberty, equality, fraternity). However, French republicanism took a much stricter form than its American cousin.
Inspired by the radicalism of the French Revolution, the French strain of republicanism mandates that all citizens must be completely equal in the eyes of the government. Article I of the Dėclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, the document that summarizes the values of the French Revolution, states that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” and that “social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.” This aversion to unnecessary social distinctions between citizens is a crucial underpinning of French political values. For example, in the U.S., we are used to revealing our demographic information on a near-daily basis — various forms and surveys from college applications to the U.S. Census require us to fill out our race and/or ethnicity. In sharp contrast, it is illegal in France to collect data on people’s race, ethnicity, or religion — any attempt to do so is punishable by five years in prison and a 300,000 euro fine. The goal of this policy, perhaps surprisingly, is to prevent discrimination. The fear is that if the government were able to access citizens’ demographic records, it could result in state-sanctioned discrimination, such as the registries of Jews kept during World War II.
Perhaps the most controversial manifestation of this state-enforced “colorblindness” is the principle of laïcitė, usually translated into English as “secularism.” This particular conception of secularism, however, is drastically different from the American commitment to the separation between church and state. American freedom of religion is predicated on liberty of religious expression in the public sphere — you can practice your religion wherever you want, however you want. French laïcitė is quite the opposite. Adopted as an official statute in 1905, laïcitė mandates a totally areligious civic sphere — religion is considered an entirely private matter and inappropriate for public display. This statute strictly limits religious expression in any space associated with the government. City halls, for example, are forbidden from displaying holiday decorations such as nativity scenes, and in 2004, students in public schools were banned from wearing religious symbols, most notably the Muslim hijab.
It is in this context, then, that a doctor can legally be fired from a government-run hospital for a beard suggestive of his Muslim identity. However, ėgalitė is not necessarily as equal as it may seem on paper. A ban on religious symbols in schools has a much more drastic impact on hijab-wearing Muslims than on Christians who wear cross-shaped necklaces. France’s republican ideals took shape when virtually the entire French population was white and Catholic. However, a recent surge in diversity, most of it occurring over the last half century, is testing the limits of France’s staunch republicanism and its compatibility with a multiethnic society.
The Changing Face of France
Since the 1940s, France has experienced a number of significant demographic shifts. In the years following World War II, North Africans, especially from the former French colonies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, migrated to France in large numbers, recruited as factory workers for burgeoning industrial centers. Many French people had expected these mostly Arab and Muslim immigrants to serve as temporary workers who would eventually return to their home countries. However, the immigrants stayed and brought their families with them, and a growing Arab community formed in France’s urban areas. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the French government constructed large housing projects on the outskirts of major French cities, in suburbs called banlieues, in an attempt to provide affordable housing for postwar working families. While the banlieues initially served as the suburban haven envisioned by the French government, they underwent a full demographic inversion in the 1970s and 1980s, comparable to “white flight” in the U.S. — white French residents moved out and were quickly replaced by North African and other immigrant families. Meanwhile, the hastily constructed housing projects fell into disrepair and eventually became the overcrowded, crumbling ghettos visible outside of French cities today. Although the word banlieue means “suburb,” it hardly has the connotation of white picket fences and two-car garages; in the modern French imagination, it evokes images of poverty, crime, and gang violence. And, most importantly, it is a racially charged term: the banlieue is where the brown people live.
While official ethnic statistics can’t be collected, estimates usually place the French Muslim population at between five to ten percent of the total population, giving France the largest Muslim population in Europe. This number continues to grow as France accepts refugees from Syria and other conflict regions. Yet despite this large demographic presence, Muslims continue to exist on the margins of French society. Studies have shown that a man with a Muslim-sounding name is four times less likely to get a job interview than an equally-qualified candidate with a Catholic-sounding name. A 2016 study also found that French respondents estimated that a whopping 31 percent of their country was Muslim, a figure four to five times larger than the actual percentage. This gross overestimate is a testament to how prominently Muslim people — and misconceptions about them — feature in the French national consciousness.
The Conflict Between Republicanism and Diversity
“The French have a very strong belief that their republican institutions are blind to ethnicity and religion, and that these institutions are an antidote to discrimination,” said David Laitin, a Stanford political science professor who conducted a study that found evidence of anti-Muslim hiring discrimination in France.
“I don’t want to say the French have failed with republicanism,” he said. “But it’s clear they have not realized their ideals.”
Laitin highlights the fundamental conflict between idealism and reality that shapes France’s current political climate. French republicanism dictates that “social distinctions can be founded only on the common good” and discourages the recognition of social differences. However, defining equality as “sameness” necessarily conflicts with the realities of a diverse society. France’s 20th-century demographic changes, compounded by recent waves of migration, have brought this tension to a head, instigating what many would call a full-blown national identity crisis.
Among many white, Catholic “Français de souche” (“native French” people), this crisis has led to increased expressions of xenophobia. For example, nearly half of the French population agrees that Islam is “incompatible” with French values. Marine Le Pen and her populist, right-wing nationalist National Front party have exploited anti-immigrant sentiment to gain increased electoral success, touting a platform that puts “native French” people first.
At the same time, supposedly “colorblind” policies in France have left minorities feeling targeted. Take, for example, the string of “burkini bans” enacted by French towns in recent years. These laws, supposedly intended to eliminate “religiously provocative” dress and reduce safety hazards, were widely recognized as part of a wave of Islamophobia that crested following France’s high-profile terrorist attacks in 2015. Some proposed policies have been so egregiously discriminatory that one is forced to wonder how they pass muster. For instance, a town in southern France announced earlier this year that it was banning pork-free meals served in local public schools — meals that had been introduced as an option for Muslim students who could not eat pork. The town’s mayor, a member of the National Front, justified the move by claiming that the pork-free cafeteria food was “anti-Republican.”
These types of policies are not only limited to right-wing localities. In October 2017, the French Parliament raised eyebrows by passing a controversial national security bill that some have called Emmanuel Macron’s version of the U.S. Patriot Act. The legislation, which is intended to combat terrorism, extends the government’s police powers in the current “state of emergency,” which was declared after the 2015 terrorist attacks. The law includes provisions for stop-and-frisk policing and gives local authorities the power to shut down “places of worship in which are disseminated the writings, ideas or theories that provoke violence, hatred and discrimination.” Critics of the law, including human rights activists and legal scholars, argue that it poses a serious threat to civil liberties and essentially legalizes anti-Muslim discrimination. The law was passed with an overwhelming majority in Parliament, capturing 415 of 577 total votes.
From Conversation to Action
Reconciling diversity and national identity certainly is not easy, and France is not the only country facing these kinds of social tensions. In fact, the U.S. actually provides a useful foil to France in this regard — not because we’ve succeeded in solving these problems, but because of the way we talk about them. Histories of discrimination in the U.S. have given rise to a modern language of identity politics that is often used when talking about diversity. Terms like “person of color,” “racial/ethnic minority,” “system of oppression,” “microagression,” and “intersectionality,” are not by any means universally used or uncontroversial; however, they give us a vocabulary with which to discuss discrimination if we so choose. Given the U.S.’s legacy of racism, this vocabulary is imperative because it allows us to call out injustices by name. Our conversation is certainly far from perfect, but at least we are having it.
France, on the other hand, lacks much of this vocabulary – literally. Many of the terms mentioned above either don’t exist in the same way in the French language or have only very recently entered the French lexicon. Moreover, any attempts to appeal to identity politics are viewed with deep suspicion by supporters of the republican establishment. Efforts to strengthen minority ethnic and religious communities are often met with scornful charges of “communitarianism” – the idea that minority groups are turning inward instead of trying to assimilate into French society. Even when the French government created a committee (Comedd: Comité pour la mesure et l’évaluation de la diversité et des discriminations) to measure the state of diversity and discrimination in France, it faced harsh criticism from those who saw the committee as evidence of the “racialization” of French society. “’Statistical measuring of diversity’ is a euphemism that hides the intention of producing ethnic statistics,” accuse a group of researchers in a 2009 report lambasting Comedd.
France’s current “identity crisis” is definitely difficult to address; however, it is not impossible. The country’s staunch commitment to a particular conception of republicanism poses the greatest obstacle to an honest national conversation about diversity, and tensions will only worsen as many black, brown, and Muslim citizens continue to feel unwelcome in their home country. This alienation can have severe consequences: many argue that the dismal prospects for French Muslim youth make these populations targets for radicalization. The myth of égalité is that equality doesn’t just happen if laws are applied equally. Rather than being a natural, passive consequence of fair government, social equality is an ideal that must be actively fought for and enforced. As the face of France changes, the French government — and the French people — can choose to change their values with it.
Erica Scott, a junior studying international relations, is a staff writer for Stanford Politics.