A greater separation of church and state

France has long had a rocky relationship with its growing Muslim population, this much is not news. But the recent debate over students' religious insignia in public schools has removed the bandage to show just how deep this sore goes. In a country where nearly 10 percent of the population practices Islam, might it soon be illegal for a Muslim girl to wear a headscarf to school?

Recent news reports have suggested that President Jacques Chirac himself is preparing a law that may bring this Orwellian situation to pass. Chirac and his prime minister are considering banning all religious symbols in schools: skullcaps and crosses included, but headscarves especially, it seems. And all this in the name of protecting the Republic from religious divisions!

The roots of French national secularism date to the Third Republic, when Jules Ferry, the minister of education, instituted the ?©coles r?©publicaines. These state schools were based on three principles: they were obligatory, free, and secular. The combination of the schools' universality and the anticlericalism of Ferry and his contemporaries ensured a broad application of the code of secularity.

As a result, the school reforms of the 1880's brought illiteracy down to negligible levels and set the French on the path to being one of the world's better-educated peoples. These successes would not have been possible without such a rigid insistence on la??cit?© ("secularism," from the Latin for "laypeople").

The campaign for la??cit?© may have some appeal to those Americans tired of hearing about Ten Commandments monoliths in Alabama courtrooms or of seeing increasing amounts of federal funds go into church coffers under President Bush's faith-based initiatives. But while France may seem to have taken the opposite tack from the US in this respect, I detect in both cases the soft rot of moral self-righteousness.

In France, the reasoning behind the la??cit?© law strays well afar of Ferry's original intension of providing free public education to every French girl and boy. Indeed, the proposal seems to evince paternalistic and frankly anti-Muslim undertones.

Supporters of the law have argued, for example, that the veils are forced upon young Muslim women, and are therefore shameful signs of female submission in a patriarchal and chauvinistic ("phallocratique") society. But the so-called moral obligation idea of saving people from their own culture has a long, dark history amongst Europeans, post-colonial regrets notwithstanding.

Another objection to the veil seems to take its cue from the post-9/11 equation of Islam and subversive political activities. There are those in France who insist that the headscarf is a political rather than a religious symbol. Wearing a headscarf often represents "the propaganda of interest groups who are pursuing their own advancement," according to an article published in Le Monde by a figure no less important than former Prime Minister Alain Jupp?©.

"The wearing of the veil is particularly worrying because it reflects a politico-religious militarism that goes well above the individual expression of piety or religious modesty," Jupp?© writes.

It seems that Americans are not the only ones who have trouble distinguishing between Muslims as worshippers and Muslims as political radicals.

And yet Jupp?© rightly points out that the state's conception of secularism has changed over the past century: the ideal no longer exists to prevent government submission to the church (in particular the Roman Catholic church), but now protects the right of the citizen to practice his religion without having other beliefs imposed on him.

How, exactly, does the wearing of the headscarf violate this principle? Here emerges the unseemliness of the debate: never was la??cit?© so dearly held until Muslim religious insignia were at issue.

The petty quarrels that have emerged over the unsuitability of the headscarf for sports classes only deepen the suspicion that the underlying discontentment has less to do with constitutional exigencies than with an ill-concealed hostility toward a certain segment of society.

The French have realized in retrospect that when Jules Ferry removed the ecclesiastical element of education in the 19th century, he replaced it with a cult of the state. Children learned to read by reciting the glories of France; public education was aimed first and foremost at producing citizens, not thinkers.

The new la??cit?© threatens to impose an even more mind-numbing type of uniformity, one that educates children to be citizens only of France instead of citizens of the world. Such an outcome would be a bitter irony for a country that served as the cradle of cosmopolitan culture, where education was the nursemaid of a still-legendary worldliness of spirit.