NOTES TO PAGES 477–83- Schooling had been discussed from the Revolution onward, most famously by Condorcet,
but in the Third Republic it became one of the focal points of government, particularly in relation
to the dangers produced by the (male)suffrage universeland by the possibility of uproars such as
the Commune. See Jean Baube ́rot,Histoire de la laı ̈cite ́en France(Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 2000). - Ce ́cile Laborde, ‘‘On Republican Toleration,’’Constellations9, no. 2 (2002): 171, 170.
- Quoted in Baube ́rot,Histoire de la laı ̈cite ́, 108.
- Claude Langlois, ‘‘Catholics and Seculars,’’ inRealms of Memory, ed. Pierre Nora, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 109. - As is the notion of ‘‘recognition’’ in the text of the 1905 law.
- Roy,La Laı ̈cite ́face a`l’islam, 42.
- Stasi, le rapport de la commission [The Stasi Report] (2003), available at http://lesrap
ports.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/BRP/034000725/0000.pdf; accessed on June 6, 2005. All transla-
tions are mine. Stasi commission members quoted in this article are Jean Baube ́rot, Gilles Kepel,
Alain Touraine, and Henri Pena-Ruiz. Only Baube ́rot spoke out against the law prohibiting ‘‘con-
spicuous religious signs.’’ Together with other critics such as E ́mile Poulat and Pierre Tevanian, he
was among those who stressed that the law in no way followed from the principle oflaı ̈cite ́but
instead might even contradict it. I agree with that view, but in what follows I try to demonstrate
that ritualistic references tolaı ̈cite ́and the lack of mediating concepts between ‘‘belonging’’ and
‘‘freedom’’ inherent in the opposition between religion and politics have produced a blindness to
the possibility of less confrontational interpretations of the presence of Islam in the public sphere. - One of the signatories of the petition against the headscarf organized by the fashion maga-
zineElle(and published inLe Mondeon December 10, 2003) was Samira Bellil, who, in ‘‘L’Enfer
des tournantes,’’ wrote a moving account of her escape from a ghetto where women are assaulted
on a daily basis (Samira Bellil,L’Enfer des tournantes[Paris: Gallimard, 2001]). - Interview inLe Monde, Decemer 18, 2003. The Stasi commission’s interpretation of the
scarf did not emerge overnight. In 1989, just after the first headscarf affair, the Conseil d’Etat ruled
that the proselytizing attitudes accompanying the wearing of the scarf were prohibited but that, in
principle, the scarf was no more than a private expression of religious belief. Therefore, it had to be
tolerated in schools. At the time, only certain neo-republicans perceived the scarf to be a threat,
while others defended it as a symbol of a modernizing Islam. - This is why I think the quote from Pena-Ruiz heading this article summarizes the absurdity
of the law and its underlying conceptual schemes. Theorizing about participation, we could, for
example, elaborate on a combination of what is called, in the international literature on multicul-
tural questions, ‘‘real exit options’’ and ‘‘parity of participation,.’’ The notion of ‘‘real exit options’’
is developed in Veit Bader, ‘‘Associative Democracy and Minorities Within Minorities,’’ inMinori-
ties Within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity, ed. Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 219–339). Nancy Fraser introduced the normative
frame of ‘‘parity of participation’’ in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth,Redistribution or Recognition?
A Political-Philosophical Exchange(London: Verso, 2003). - A more perverse proposal is to prohibit only the headscarves and not other ‘‘conspicuous’’
religious signs. This solution has been suggested by some Dutch and German politicians, who want
to accept crosses and kippas as religious signs, while rejecting the headscarf as being a political sign
of fundamentalist politics and the submission of women. This proposal does not address the real,
underlying problems any more than the French law does. The advantage of dealing with the specific
problem of radical Islam is outweighed by the fact that this would be a plainly discriminatory
measure against a large group of citizens, which would be generally and systematically associated
with terror, radicalism, and the oppression of women.
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