YOLANDE JANSENwas famously dubbed by Edgar Morin, and there is little freedom for the pupils on either
side of the spectrum. It is not accidental that the two teachers depicted are women. The
first greatlaı ̈ceducational law, of August 1879, obliged every department of France to
have a teachers’ training college for women. Jules Ferry, the minister of education, argued
that Catholicism upheld its influence through women, positing that ‘‘women must belong
to Science (and not) to the Church.’’^11 The smoking factories in the background of the
cartoon suggest that underneath the superficial difference between public and private
schools is the same inescapable ‘‘capitalist hell.’’^12
The cartoons contain some key concepts from the present-day discourse of multicul-
turalism. The concepts of respect and commune are particularly striking.^13 It is as though
the slogans of those forms of pluralism that seek to overcome the neglect of difference
and inequality in formal conceptions of liberal citizenship, well known from the philoso-
phies of Will Kymlicka, Iris Marion Young, or Charles Taylor, were anticipated in France
in such a way that, as a cultural memory, they appear to imply a return to a premodern
traditionalism linked with predemocratic structures of society. Thus, these forms of plu-
ralism seem themselves to imply inequality.
‘‘The Declaration’’ and ‘‘Choose, you’re free’’ share a specific conception of history.
They conceive of societal change as taking place in either radically backward or forward
movement. The direction of modern society is not a gradual mediation between group
belonging and formal citizenship, but sudden change through revolutionary steps; only
such change can move inherently immobile systems. We can only fall back into premod-
ern, that is, communal social structures or be dragged in the direction of an inescapable
‘‘capitalist hell’’—or perhaps in the direction of a second Revolution, which would prom-
ise an entirely new form of community. Because of this revolution-based conception of
history, it is difficult for memory, tradition, community, and religion to be interwoven or
entangled with modernity, freedom, and democratic politics.
In contemporary questions surrounding the presence of Islam, we are now dealing
with the religion of a minority that has no history of political domination, as Catholicism
did. Rather, both in the colonies and in contemporary France, Islam is associated with a
history of a lack of power, a history that, moreover, involves ethnic othering. This affects
the applicability of the frame oflaı ̈cite ́.We cannot responsibly transpose the imaginary
structure of the struggle between church and state into an abstract opposition between
politics and religion, then translate it into a concern about the role of ‘‘political religion’’
in contemporary society. This, however, is precisely what happens in the discourse of
laı ̈cite ́,as Olivier Roy has argued.^14 I think a deeper critique should also be made. In what
follows, I try to demonstrate that it is not enough to distance ourselves from thelaı ̈cite ́de
combat(‘‘combatantlaı ̈cite ́’’) inherited from the Third Republic (as, for example, the Stasi
committee does), or even to distance ourselves from the frame oflaı ̈cite ́in general (as
Olivier Roy does). Instead, we should also criticize the unhelpful conceptual schemes
inherited fromlaı ̈cite ́’scultural history,showing the traces of the modernist abstract op-
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