TRYING TO UNDERSTAND FRENCH SECULARISMthe political senses. It is that body that offers the promise of freedom in the world. That
body is co-terminous with the law, and the law doesn’t only accord the same rights and
freedoms to all citizens (redeem them) but demands obedience from them under threat
of punishment. In Paul’s utterance, by contrast, it is preciselynotthe law that promises
redemption,notpolitics, but God’s infinite love for all—regardless of difference. This
freedom is not political; it does not rest on the circulation of political signs. It is the
freedom and bondage that comes frombeing in love.
For Rousseau, the great theorist of freedom as will (and advocate of a civil religion),
the domain of politics was a public space of male activity; the entry of women into politics
would, he thought, be against nature. Most feminists have long been highly critical of
Rousseau for this reason, but Mona Ozouf—following Pierre Rosanvallon—has recently
offered an interesting interpretation.^66 The Rousseauean opposition between men (cul-
ture) and women (nature) radicalized the Jacobin conception of the citizen as someone
whose abstract quality was connected to his autonomy. Precisely because women were
seen as socially dependent on someone else, they were not eligible for full citizenship.
That, says Ozouf, explains the late acquisition of the vote by women in France. In America
and Britain, by contrast, women were given the vote much earlier, but as women and not
as individuals. She then goes on to make a more intriguing if controversial observation
to account for the singularity of French feminism: ‘‘If Frenchwomen experience their
specific attributes in a less anguished and less recriminating way than do American
women, is it not because, in France, differences are subordinate—and not contrary—to
equality? When everyone has an intimate conviction that the abstract equality of individu-
als must inevitably triumph over differences, these differences can be experienced without
being violently rejectedorfetishized.’’^67 The national genius of France, Ozouf believes,
rests on the general conviction that ‘‘an essence [is] shared by all French people,’’^68 and it
is this essence that facilitates the French sense of gender equality.
But if women are at once equivalent and individually different, two questions arise.
First, how do atomized individuals form a unity in the national community? The answer
for some seems to be: by virtue of the essence they share (perhaps Durkheim’s idea of
‘‘mechanical solidarity’’). An abstract equality is already built into the notion ofFrench
citizenship, defining the necessary unity through equivalence. Second, whatdifferencesare
accepted and why? Can the ‘‘Islamic veil,’’ as worn by French schoolgirls, be a site for
rearticulatingconjunction and disjunction? My impression is that this possibility is rejected
because the veil is seen as essentially havinga veiling function(it is a symbol that can be
removed). It hides the truth of signs from the light of reason, which would allow differ-
ence to be read as it should be read: as—in Ozouf ’s formulation—difference subordinate
to equality. What that truth points to is not the veil itself nor even its absencebut the
command that it be removed.
An argument is sometimes made by supporters of gender equality that the veil is
intolerable because it symbolizes the attribution to women of an absolute or innate re-
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