In 2003-2004, a great public controversy broke out in France over the right of Muslim high school students to attend class wearing their hijab. The debate had remained latent since its earliest manifestations in 1989, and then took on a new intensity, leading to the passage in 2004 by the French National Assembly of a law prohibiting the wearing of the hijab in class.
The Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) of which Daniel Bensaïd was one of the main leaders and theoreticians, found itself deeply divided. As a respected authority in his party, Bensaïd largely abstained from taking a public position during this period, possibly because of his worrisome state of health, and possibly as well to preserve party unity, of which he was in some manner the guarantor. But in the immediate wake of the polemic, which was to flare up again a short time later, he published in 2005 a series of very engaging reflections under the title of Fragments mécréants (roughly, Fragments of an Unbeliever).[1] Although the scope of the book is much more panoramic, and although many of the subjects raised go far beyond the immediate circumstances, the “headscarf controversy” (la “querelle du foulard”), which is the starting point of the book, is also, no doubt, what justified its publication at that particular moment.
Daniel Bensaïd did not place himself above the fray but sought to situate the controversy in the general terrain of the ideological and political decomposition of which it is a symptom: “The law against wearing the Islamic headscarf seems to have provoked an explosive controversy. […] The fuse had been lit a long time before.” Its genealogy is indeed a long one. It affects and potentiates all the “identity” questions raised over the past several years, or even decades, and at the heart of these are the questions of immigration, racism, and in particular Islamophobia, a supposedly “respectable racism”[2] – and, in corollary fashion, the rise of the extreme right. Looking back at these polemics of over 20 years ago, we can better perceive the foundational character of this whole sequence of events in determining the balance of political and ideological forces ever since, that is, the long drift that has led to rising fascism and the concrete danger of fascism in France.
Bensaïd saw the source of the hardening of identities, and thus of Islamophobia, in the rise in the 1980s of the “liberal counter-reform”, with the “frenzy (déchaînement) of competition in the labor market” and the “individualization of wage labor” that accompanied it. The point for him was not to remain at the surface of things, since ideological movements always have a material basis. These phenomena were placed in relation with broader questions such as the recurrence of abstract universalism or the cult of the disciplinary Republic in the service of capital (“la République fouettarde”[3]), as manifestations of the long “ideological debacle” of the left, with the spread of an Islamophobic consensus as one of its spectacular manifestations.
“Democracy is escaping us and the Republic along with it. Whose fault is it? Voltaire, Rousseau? May ’68? Is it the Islamic headscarf as is claimed? No! It’s the invisible and murderous hand of the markets!” After noting surprise at “the passions unleashed by the appearance of a few Islamic headscarves,” he concluded, logically, that this article of clothing “reveals more than it hides. As an indicator of national frustrations, it crystallizes the collective hysteria of a declining power that clings to its dreams and its extinct splendor.”
While he implicitly provided some good arguments for understanding, analyzing, and denouncing what he mocked, following Alain Badiou, as the “Headscarvian Law” (la Loi foulardière) of 2004, he never actually denounced it. He even let it be understood that the exclusion of young women from school because of the Islamic headscarf could be legitimate in certain cases; each case should be examined to understand the motivation of the pupils concerned, and their possible intention to proselytize. While he recognized the law’s obvious discriminatory character, he mostly saw it as useless. This was a way of dodging the issue, in order to maintain a consensus within the LCR, as expressed in the slogan “no veil [but also] no law,” which was compatible with the actual dismissal of pupils from school over the “veil,” which some leaders of his party had actively sought before the passage of the law. One of them had personally organized the dismissal of his own pupil, an adolescent aged 16.[4]
Bensaïd observed with distress that the debates over this question of prohibiting the headscarf in school had provoked a serious crisis within the LCR, in which the two sides almost came to blows. He forged and promoted a compromise in order to put an end to the crisis. But the compromise was a weak one and the crisis continued for several years thereafter, in particular when, in 2010, in French regional elections, a chapter of the LCR in Avignon presented on its list a “veiled” candidate, thus rekindling a fierce internal debate among all the tendencies within the organization and nearly leading to its paralysis.
Bensaïd thus chose to present the law as a mere diversion intended to mobilize public opinion on a question that was, in the end, of secondary importance, so as to shift attention away from struggles against the government’s economic and social policies. However, the law’s effects, its insertion within a racist policy, and its contribution to the racialization of society were thereby treated euphemistically. Above all, he seriously underestimated the way in which the debates accompanying the law contributed to the legitimation of a far-right that was already becoming “de-demonized.”
In the 20 years that followed, which have brought the Rassemblement National (RN, formerly the Front National) very close to the gates of power, unfortunately have shown how harmful this underestimation could be. Although his thinking could have provided powerful intellectual means for understanding the phenomenon and its implications, it appears that the political leader’s concern for the internal pacification of his organization, in which the debate on Islamophobia and on laïcité had taken a disproportionate place, prevented the theoretician from taking full measure of the problem. Politics in the narrowest sense of the term – the spirit of responsibility of an organizational leader – had prevailed over the deepening of his always stimulating theoretical reflection.
Translated from the French by Jim Cohen
[1] Fragments mécréants. Mythes identitaires et république imaginaire, Lignes-Essais, 2005. All the quotes by Bensaïd are taken from this text.
[2] The phrase is from the work by sociologist Saïd Bouamama: L’affaire du foulard islamique – la production d’un racisme respectable [The Islamic Headscarf Affair: The Production of a Respectable Racism], Geai Bleu, 2004.
[3] “La République fouettarde” – literally the whipping or spanking Republic – is an allusion to the well-known figure of folklore in the east of France, the Père fouettard, whom children fear and who is the foil to the Père Noël [Father Christmas].
[4] For more details on this episode, and more generally regarding the position of the LCR on this subject, see my book La « gauche », les Noirs et les Arabes, La Fabrique, 2010.
