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..."veil" by its supporters, it is neither; what the wearers call the hijab covers hair and neck, leaving the face tightly framed. This ban was the culmination of long and intense debate including a five-month investigation by the nonpartisan "Stasi Commission" appointed by President Jacques Chirac in July 2003.
The law went into effect in the autumn of 2004. In its first year, only forty-eight girls and three Sikh boys were expelled, but the debate has rocked the nation and sent tremors around the world. In August, days before the new school year, events took a surreal turn when two French journalists and their chauffeur were taken hostage in Iraq and held for 124 days; their captors demanded that the French government abolish the ban.
Although the law only mentions elementary and secondary public schools, new incidents crop up regularly. A Paris meter reader was suspended for wearing a headscarf under her hat. Authorities prohibited a fashion show of beveiled women. Schools have forbidden beveiled mothers from volunteering in libraries and for school outings. A university cafeteria refused to serve a beveiled girl. A municipal official stopped a bride's aunt from signing as a witness when she refused to remove her hijab "for identification." (1)
The recent affair is not the first of its kind; two such incidents preceded it, and beveiled girls were suspended from schools in 1989 and 1993. Yet none attained the proportions of the present clash. For instance, whereas the Lexis-Nexis database shows ten articles in the francophone press that discussed the French hijab or "Islamic headscarf" in 1989-1990 and about 150 articles in 1993-1994, it jumps to nearly 1,000 in 2003-2004. In January 2006 Google.fr showed about 55,000 hits for these terms.
The unprecedented intensity of this controversy, incomprehensible to most foreigners, stems from the fundamental meanings attributed to this bit of cloth. The controversy reveals and further distills the transformation of French political culture over the last fifteen years. At the core of this culture lies an apparent near-consensus around a resuscitated national identity and model for humanity: that of la France laique et republicaine, the universalist, secular, republican France. The hijab has been constructed as a dire threat to this identity, and the ban as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism and also "American-style" multiculturalism. This model has replaced international utopias, particularly borderless socialism. Despite its universalist pretensions, I contend that it is a nationalized, even nationalistic model that "others" ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, as well as those who quite simply deny its "universality."
The hijab saga is, bizarrely, my own story. No, I am not a Muslim nor veiled. I am an immigrant of a different ilk: a baby-boomer American; an atheist Jew; a lifelong feminist, radical, and antiracist activist; and an insider-outsider observer of and participant in French politics. Don't get me wrong: I strongly believe that veils are symbols and factors in women's oppression, and I am still that child who refused to utter the "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Yet the changes in political culture that culminated in the ban have "othered" me as effectively as it has the beveiled girls. The hijab story is, for me, one of lost utopias, retracting borders, and entrenchment.
I have been trying to write some version of this article for years. Although I am not alone in my critiques, I have not published it in France; indeed, an earlier incarnation of this article appeared as far away as possible, in Australia. (2) First, I knew it would be discounted in France by those I criticize, illegitimated because "foreign," American, and, even worse, feminist American. After spending almost three decades in France--nearly all my adult life--and despite the fact that my French is fluent, that I have been a "public servant" for twenty-eight years, and that I am (undeportable as) the mother of two French children, I am a failure of the much-touted French integration.
Mostly, however, my silence has been strategic. Although I have opposed many proponents of this republican model on specific issues in the past, on the issue of the ban my opponents have included my closest feminist sisters. Given the unparalleled passion of the debate, voicing my positions would mean that, for many people I deeply respect, I would cross the line into the enemy camp. On the other side, some Greens, human rights, Far Left, and a few feminist activists oppose the ban, but my political home does not lie with them. Although they vocally set themselves apart, their opposition has dovetailed with that of increasingly visible fundamentalists, anti-Americans, and anti-Semites. How can I protest alongside the bearded men keeping watch over the rows of veiled women or in a demonstration including a group that has chanted "death to the Jews" and in which some believe that the story of the Shoah was invented to justify Israeli occupation of Palestine?
The hijab story lies at the intersection of the myriad developments since 1989 that have resuscitated and recentralized a nationalist republican model: the discrediting of international utopias and of revolution, the rise of the neofascist Right, increased anti-Americanism, the rejection of multiculturalism, and the fragmentation and recomposition of political blocs. The veiled girls singularly embody these historical processes, and their story contextualizes the birth of a new "woman of color" feminism.
FROM INTERNATIONALISM TO NATIONAL UNIVERSALISM
When I first arrived in France in 1975, political models were varied and conflicting, but most radicals shared a vision with international scope incorporating some form of borderless socialism. No nation-state was immune to criticism; my condemnation of the United States was no less vigorous than my friends' denunciations of France. I felt welcomed into the French part of an international community.
By the late 1980s, as France entered its second term of Mitterrandiste socialism, that international viewpoint had eroded to the point of near invisibility. A generation of nouveaux philosophes had argued that the Gulag, the Stalinist horrors, showed that all forms of socialism were not just bankrupt, but de facto evils. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, many took this not just as the symbolic end to Soviet communism but more broadly as vindication of anticommunist, antisocialist, or at least antirevolutionary positions. These "new philosophers," after dissociating themselves from the Left for years, later reclaimed the label after the said Left grew closer to their positions, notably a renovated, moralistic humanitarianism. They and other "public intellectuals" became general practitioners of mass media political philosophy, with near-rock-star status, called upon to pontificate on everything from French foreign policy to tsunamis, the homeless, and the hijab.
Nineteen eighty-nine also marked the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The very nature of the Revolution came under scrutiny. Some argued that, as Stalinism was inherent to communism, the Terror and totalitarianism were inherent to the French Revolution. In a counteroffensive, many public intellectuals resurrected a different Revolutionary model, la France laique et republicaine. This secular and republican model began filling the void left by international socialism. My shared Franco-American, international utopias began giving way to a national model.
Not all got on the bandwagon. For a short period in the early Mitterrand years, the term "democracy" came back into vogue. It carried with it the issues of minority rights and hence of multiculturalism. A brief window opened to the emergent movement of first-generation French-born children of Maghrebi (North African), sub-Saharan African, and other...
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