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TRYING TO UNDERSTAND FRENCH SECULARISM

The school is sacred because proper formation is integral to the founding myth of the
secular Republic.
Ironically, it is not religious schools that are said to be sacred but secular schools,
those directly administered by the state, in which no ‘‘religious signs’’ may appear. Pupils
may move between the sacred space and time of public schools and the profane space
and time of the street (and of home, mosque, and Internet in thebanlieus). Because the
public school is sacred, it should not be exposed to contamination by worldly interests.
One might expect that it was therefore also the protected space of imagination and fantasy
in contrast to the ‘‘real’’ world of constraint. But for defenders oflaı ̈cite ́that does not
appear to be so.
The public school is a pedagogic structure that ‘‘the Republic’’ presents as a space of
emancipation. That space sustains contradictory demands, however: on the one hand,
that the individual define herself, and on the other, that she be bound by an unconditional
obedience to the nation-state and hence submit to schoolteachers and other state officials.
This contradiction is nicely brought out in the following statement by a member of the
Stasi commission, who insists that secular schools do not deny differences:

They simply take care that these differences are asserted in a way compatible with the

universalism of rights and the personal freedom to define or even redefine oneself

without being tied down by group loyalty....Anattitude of inquiry and of open-

mindedness to knowledge is incompatible with the peremptory assertion of an iden-

tity more fantasized than freely chosen [une identite ́plus fantasme ́e que librement

choisie], especially at an impressionable age.... Many of the pupils are minors, and

it is unrealistic to maintain that they know clearly who they are and what they do.^74

According to positivism, fantasy is the very essence of ‘‘religion’’ because it asserts
the possibility of existing in ‘‘another world.’’ If fantasy has any role in the formation of
adults in the ultimate—scientific, industrial—phase of human progress, says positivism,
it is to provide inconsequential amusement, play that must never be taken seriously. (The
Romantic tradition has a more positive view of fantasy, allowing that it is necessary to
both morality and sanity. As does Freud.) Only the disciplined subject, positivism insists,
can choose freely, by breaking away from the traces she has inherited. This is possible
only when she has been properly taught what is real and rational, which is why boys and
girls must be subject to the same secular regime. What seems to emerge fromthisdis-
course is not that secularism ensures equality and freedom but that particular versions of
‘‘equality’’ and ‘‘freedom’’ ensurelaı ̈cite ́.
Laı ̈cite ́is the mode in which the Republic teaches the subjects in its care about what
counts as real, and what they themselves really are, in order better to govern them by
letting them govern themselves. There is something more important at stake than the
individual’s desire to decide for herself: what is to count as knowledge of reality on the

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