LAI ̈CITE ́position betweenappartenance(‘‘belonging’’), on the one hand, and freedom, on the
other. I will substantiate this in both the moderate discourse onlaı ̈cite ́of the Stasi com-
mittee and Olivier Roy’s critique of it.
The Stasi Report
In July 2003, the president of the Republic, in the midst of ongoing conflicts about girls
who came to school wearing headscarves, appointed a commission of prominent French
philosophers, jurists, sociologists, historians, and pedagogues, led by the Christian-Demo-
cratic politician Bernard Stasi, to examine the situation. (In particular, in the early sum-
mer of 2003 a lot of media attention had been devoted to the case of two daughters of an
atheist Jewish father in Aubervilliers, Paris, who had presented themselves at school wear-
ing scarves, had refused to take them off, and had been sent away from school. Their
father, a lawyer at the antidiscrimination organization MRAP, did not like their decision
but defended their right to wear the scarves.) At the end of its deliberations, the commit-
tee issued the ‘‘Stasi Report,’’ which provides a lengthy analysis and redefinition oflaı ̈cite ́
and imparts to the French government the crucial recommendation that it issue a law
prohibiting the wearing of ‘‘conspicuous religious signs’’ in schools.^15
The headscarf conflicts provided the major focus of the report, but other struggles
were at least as important. The report mentions, among other things, Islamic women’s
refusal to be treated by male doctors, Islamic pupils’ refusal to participate in physical
education, the refusal of Islamic pupils or their parents to acknowledge the authority of
female teachers, Islamic pupils’ refusal to attend classes on the Holocaust, the general rise
of anti-Semitism, the increase in group thinking at schools in general, and the pressures
brought to bear on young people, girls in particular, to define themselves as members of
a ‘‘different’’ community. Although the Stasi Report does not mention September 11, a
fear of terror and the generally acknowledged possibility that, with its large Muslim popu-
lation, France too could once more fall victim to a terrorist assault probably also inspired
the French government to rethink the merits oflaı ̈cite ́. After all, as recently as 1995,
members of the Algerian GIA had exploded three bombs in the Paris Metro, killing eight
and wounding two hundred.
The Stasi committee sought to answer these challenges by rethinking the compatibil-
ity oflaı ̈cite ́and pluralism, as well as their limits. The explicit aim of the committee’s
redefinition oflaı ̈cite ́was to provide a common ground on which to live in diversity, not
a denunciation of diversity itself in the name of a Jacobin heritage. When read superfi-
cially, the Stasi report is one of the most pluralistic documents ever produced in French
official circles. The committee explicitly distances itself fromlaı ̈cite ́de combat(2.3). Quite
symbolically, the concluding words of the report are ‘‘le pluralisme, la diversite ́[pluralism,
diversity]’’ (Conclusion). These two concepts occur throughout the report. With regard
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