NOTES TO PAGES 506–8
- Nicolas Sene`ze, ‘‘La Re ́gime particulier de l’Eglise catholique,’’La Croix6 (November
2003).
- At the very end of 2004, talks were being held between ‘‘liberal’’ Muslims and the interior
minister with a view to establishing a more representative body for French Muslims, on the model
of the Conseil Repre ́sentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF). It was maintained that since
the existing council, the Conseil Franc ̧ais du Culte Musulman (CFCM), represented practicing
Muslims only, it should confine itself to religious matters, such as the training of imams, and a
secular body should be set up to represent the (majority) nonpracticing Muslims in France. (See
Piotr Smoler and Xavier Ternisien, ‘‘Le Ministre de l’inte ́rieur souhaite faire e ́merger une instance
repre ́sentative d’un ‘islam laı ̈que,’ ’’Le Monde, December 7, 2004). There is also much talk of
creating ‘‘a French Islam,’’ that is, of promoting doctrinal as well as institutional reform of Islam in
order to adjust it to France as a nation-state. What is notable for my argument, however, is that,
despite the rejection of communitarianism, the Republic encourages the formation of ‘‘representa-
tive’’ bodies of Jews and Muslims.
- SeeLaı ̈cite ́et Re ́publique, 52–54.
- ‘‘La Re ́publique est laı ̈que et respecte toutes les croyances. De ce principe fondateur, de ́-
coulent de nombreuses obligations, juridiques aussi bien pour les usagers que pour les services
publics, acommencer par l’e ́ducation nationale. Mais ce re ́gime juridique est loin de constituer un bloc monolithique. Il est ala fois e ́pars, car disperse ́dans de nombreuses sources juridiques, et
divers, car la laı ̈cite ́n’a pas les meˆme contours aParis, aStrasbourg, ou a`Mayotte [The Republic is
secular and respects all beliefs. From this foundational principle flow many obligations, legal as
much for public services as for those who use them, beginning with national education. But this
legal regime is far from being a monolithic block. It is at once scattered, because dispersed in
numerous legal sources, and diverse, because secularism does not have the same contours in Paris,
in Strasbourg, or in Mayotte]’’ (ibid., 45).
- See Emile Poulat,Eglise contre Bourgeoisie: Introduction au devenir du catholicisme actuel
(Paris: Casterman, 1977), chap. 3.
- The common term that I have translated here as ‘‘fundamentalist Islam’’ isl’islamisme.At
an earlier time, when there were very few Muslims in France to speak of (it is estimated that there
were fifty thousand in 1900), the enemy was identified quite simply as ‘‘Islam.’’ In referring to the
anticolonial movements in North Africa immediately after the Second World War, for example—
with which the French Communist Party sympathized—Georges Duhamel wrote: ‘‘Morocco, Tuni-
sia, Algeria.... Everything in these countries is working against France: the forces of Islam as well
as those of communism’’ (Le Figaro, February 5, 1954; cited in Ge ́rard Vincent, ‘‘Communism as a
Way of Life,’’ inA History of Private Life, vol. 5, ed. A. Prost and G. Vincent [Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1991], 329). Many commentators on present French attitudes toward North Afri-
can ‘‘immigrants’’ have insisted that they must be understood as the restructuration of racist atti-
tudes in colonial Algeria, of the experience of a brutal war of independence, and of the French
concern to keep the Islamists from coming democratically to power there. For an interesting ac-
count of the interconnection between concerns about Algerian immigration and about Islamic
fundamentalism (expressed in the notorious Folembray affair of 1994), see Thomas Deltombe,
‘‘Quand l’islamisme devient spectacle,’’Le Monde diplomatique, August 2004.
- Although the state use of torture is recorded by organizations such as Human Rights
Watch and objected to by most liberals, neither the publication of evidence nor the protests have a
long-term inhibiting effect on its practitioners. Witness, most recently, the U.S. employment of
torture in Guanta ́namo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan—and the impunity that senior officials (govern-
ment and military) enjoy with regard to it.
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