France on Fire
Mark Lilla
Each of these views has problems, but it is the multiculturalist one that seems the least in touch with social and political reality today. Not because the French don’t need to learn to accommodate more differences, but because it refuses to recognize the very disturbing developments in the Islamic world today (which are anything but accommodating to differences) and how they have already affected French life. The current mantra, which President Hollande felt obliged to repeat, is that Islamic terrorism has “nothing to do with Islam” and that the most important thing is not to “make an amalgam” of all Muslims. (The Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, went even further, declaring the terrorists to be “without faith”—in other words, infidels.) But this attitude only reinforces an institutional and intellectual omertà that makes it difficult even to discuss what is really going on in the schools.
The evidence has been there for anyone who cared to look for it, in books like those of Kepel and the growing literature of memoirs written by former teachers in the quartiers who gave up because they could not control their classes or enforce the principle of laicity. In 2004, for example, the Chirac government received a report it had commissioned on the presence of religious “signs and belonging” in the schools, which was promptly buried because its results were so disturbing. This Obin Report was based on on-site visits government inspectors made to over sixty middle and high schools across France, concentrating on disfavored quartiers.
The extent to which life in many of them had been, to employ Kepel’s term, “halalized” shocked them. The report recounts stories of girls being under constant surveillance by self-appointed older brothers who mete out corporal punishment with fists and belts if they deem modesty to have been violated. Wearing skirts or dresses is impossible in many places, also for female teachers. There is an obsession with purity, as students and their parents demand separate swimming hours or refuse to let their children go on school trips where the sexes might mix. If they do go, some refuse to enter cathedrals or churches.
There are fathers who won’t shake hands with female teachers, or let their wives speak alone to male teachers. There are cases of children refusing to sing, or dance, or learn an instrument, or draw a face, or use a mathematical symbol that resembles a cross. The question of dress and social mixing has led to the abandonment of gym classes in many places. Children also feel emboldened to refuse to read authors or books that they find religiously unacceptable: Rousseau, Molière, Madame Bovary. Certain subjects are taboo: evolution, sex ed, the Shoah. As one father told a teacher, “I forbid you to mention Jesus to my son.”
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There is little way of knowing how widespread these phenomena are, though since the massacres teachers in the quartiers have gone to the press to unburden themselves. And the instinctive response of many journalists and scholars every time stories like these are told—that they are totally unrepresentative, that even if true they are stigmatizing and play into the hands of the National Front—simply isn’t adequate. The deeper question the Obin Report raised was whether the French educational establishment had a coherent response to offer when these incidents do occur. The inspectors note in the report that administrators minimized the problems teachers reported and gave little support, though they themselves had little guidance from above. This is what Najat Vallaud-Belkacem meant when she criticized the tendency not to “make waves.” After Chirac received the Obin Report it took a year of nagging for his government education minister to release it, to little effect. Since the massacres, however, it is being widely discussed..
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Following the journalistic and academic response to recent events, I am reminded of American racial politics in the 1970s, when it was considered racist in liberal circles to discuss cultural factors in persistent poverty in African-American urban neighborhoods. Not only, as black Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has recently been arguing, did this taboo prevent researchers and policymakers from addressing such factors. It also made American liberalism seem out of touch with reality—giving the right wing the opportunity to present itself as living in a “no-spin zone” and inviting voters in. And we know what happened then.