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January 16, 2004
French law not new
Letters
Editor: Your editorial entitled "Don't ban uniqueness"
(Bulletin, Jan. 2) criticizes the French government's recent
ban on the wearing of religious symbols, such as Muslim scarfs,
kippot and crucifixes, in the country's public school system. It
concludes with the condemnatory statement that: "It is a lurch
backward toward a homogeneous, conforming, ethnic-based ideal that
European and North American societies should have advanced beyond."
The editorial gives expression to an unfortunately widespread misunderstanding
of the purpose of that ban.
In reality, there is nothing radically new in President Chirac's
support for it: The ban merely gives renewed force to a practice
dictated a century ago by the strict separation of religion and
state, won in consequence of a protracted struggle, which saw governments
of the Third Republic (1870-1940) fight the Catholic Church for
control over public education. As a corollary of the separation
of church and state, France got what the church reviled as "School
without God" (l'ecole sans Dieu); a strictly secular
public school system, which educated children in the spirit of respect
for moral principles of universal validity and for the ideals and
democratic values of the republic, as against the institutions of
the monarchy, after which the church and the extreme-right hankered.
Not surprisingly, Petain's Vichy regime endeavored to reinstate
the preponderance of the Catholic Church in the schools.
Although no religious symbols were to be displayed in schools, the
Republic was not anti-religious. It decreed that religion was a
matter of individual conscience. It instituted a mid-week day off
from school (which in my childhood was Thursday) to enable churches
to hold religious classes for children whose parents wished that
for them. Furthermore, parents who desire their children to receive
a fully religious education have always sent their children to non-government
"free schools" (écoles libres), most of
which are religious in character.
Orthodox Jews send their children to Jewish "free schools,"
in which boys wear kippot and there are no classes on Saturdays.
Most Jews, however, send their children to public schools, in the
awareness that they have to be in class on Saturdays and are not
allowed to sport kippot. Anxious as they were to integrate into
French society, the many thousands of Jews who immigrated to France
from eastern Europe and North Africa over the 20th century accepted
this situation.
The strict secularism of the French public school system is not
the manifestation of a "19th-century nationalistic concept
of citizenship." There never was a single concept of citizenship
in the 19th century in any case: there was ethnic nationalism (on
the German model), messianic nationalism (on the models of Poland
and religious Zionism, for example) and civic nationalism, on the
French or American model. The French Republic proclaimed, besides
the universalistic values of "liberty, equality and brotherhood,"
the indivisibility of the republic. All who were born or naturalized
were regarded as French citizens, regardless of their ethnic origins
or religious affiliation.
Why then all the fuss about the reiteration of a law that has been
in existence for a century? France is overwhelmed with millions
of Muslim immigrants, many of whom refuse to assimilate in the way
past immigrants did. Some of them are manipulated and intimidated
by militant Islamists, who seek to subvert the democratic institutions
of France and even work towards establishing the supremacy of Islam
in France and Europe. There is plenty of money available, from Saudi
and other sources, to establish Muslim "free schools";
instead, Muslim families are known to have been offered payment
if their daughters provocatively wear the Muslim headscarf in public
schools. That is the danger in France, not the supposed "lurch
backward" to a supposedly "ethnic-based ideal" in
the conclusion of your editorial.
Rene Goldman
Summerland, B.C.
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