No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Laïcité, Republic and Nation in Post-Colonial France
Review products
EmileChabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 301 pp., £ 21.99, ISBN 9781107692879
PaolaMattei and Andrew S.Aguilar, Secular institutions, Islam, and Education policy: France and the U.S. in comparative perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 236 pp., £ 53.99. ISBN 9780230284203
PhilippePortier, L’État et les religions en France. Une sociologie historique de la laïcité (Rennes: presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 367 pp., €24, ISBN: 9782753549937
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2018
Extract
The question of ‘secularity’ (laïcité) has risen sharply up the French political agenda over the last twenty-five years. Ways in which it is defined and applied are hotly contested and lie at the nerve centre of wide debates about the nature of the Republic, French national identity and indeed of France's colonial past. According to an IFOP opinion poll in November 2015, 87 per cent of French people agreed that was important to respect laïcité at school, 84 per cent of respondents said that it was part of France's identity while 81 per cent thought that it was under threat in France. That said, they did not agree on what laïcité meant. For 32 per cent it meant separating religion from politics, for 27 per cent it meant ensuring liberty of conscience, while 17 per cent said it meant reducing the influence of religion in society. Historians, sociologists and political scientists as well as journalists and activists join battle on the question, and a selection of their recent contributions, from different angles and with different methodologies, are reviewed here.
- Type
- Review Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018
References
2 Gildea, Robert, Education in Provincial France, 1800–1914. A Study of Three Departments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 108–13.Google Scholar
3 Sieyès, Abbé, What is the Third Estate? (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), 58Google Scholar. See also Sewell, William H., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution. The Abbé Sieyès and What is the Third Estate (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Renan, ‘Qu'est-ce que la Nation?’, in Hutchinson, John and Smith, Anthony D., eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 17–8.Google Scholar See also Citron, Suzanne, Le Mythe national. L'Histoire de la France en Question (Paris: Les Éditions ouvrières, 1991).Google Scholar
6 Nora, Pierre, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92).Google Scholar
7 Anderson, Perry, ‘Union Sucrée’, London Review of Books, 26, 13 (23 Sept. 2004)Google Scholar; Anderson, La Pensée tiède. Un regard critique sur la culture française (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 52, 121.
8 Scott, Joan, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 Bruckner, Pascal, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 On this see Kepel, Gilles, Terreur dans l'Hexagone. Genèse du Djihad Français (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 35–47Google Scholar, and Kokoreff, Michel, ‘The Political Dimension of the 2005 Riots’, in Waddington, David, Jobard, Fabien and King, Mike, eds., Rioting in the UK and France. A Comparative Perspective (Cullumpton: Willan, 2009), 147–56.Google Scholar
11 See, for example, Debray, Régis, Ce que nous voile le voile : La République et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 2003)Google Scholar; Finkielkraut, Alain, Qu'est-ce que la France (Paris: Stock, 2007).Google Scholar
12 See, for example, Touraine, Alain, Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Wieviorka, Michel, L'avenir de l'Islam en France et en Europe (Paris: Balland, 2003).Google Scholar
13 Among his publications are Histoire de la Laïcité française (Paris: PUF, 2000) and Laïcité, 1905–2005. Entre passion et raison (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
14 Stoler, Ann Laura and Cooper, Frederick, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Cooper, and Stoler, , eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Scott, Joan, The Politics of the Veil; Patricia Lorcin, ed., Algeria & France, 1800–2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Shepard, Todd, The Invention of Decolonization. The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Marsh, Kate, ed., France's Lost Empires. Fragmentation, Nostalgia and la fracture colonial (Boulder: Lexington Books, 2011)Google Scholar; Stovall, Tyler, Transnational France: The Modern History of a Universal Nation ( University of California: Santa Cruz, 2015).Google Scholar
16 Blanchard, Pascal, Bancel, Nicolas and Lemaire, Sandrine, La Fracture coloniale. La Societe francaise au prisme de l'héritage colonial (Paris: La Decouverte, 2005).Google Scholar
17 See, for example, Stora, Benjamin, Le Gangrène et l'oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991)Google Scholar and Stora, Histoire de la guerre d'Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris: La Découverte, 1993).