The official French preoccupation with the veil exceeds that of most other countries in Western Europe. In the Anglo-American world, even post 9/11, the veil is not seen as the flag of an insurrection; nor is the suppression of ethnic, racial, and religious differences a requirement for inclusion in the nation. A line from the American poet, Walt Whitman, captures something of the way diversity is celebrated here: “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he wrote. This is not to say that there aren’t terrible and enduring problems of discrimination based on differences (of race especially) in the US, just to note that differences are here recognized as part of the national heritage. They are tracked in the census, documented in official data collections, understood to be the source of our cultural richness. Hyphenated designations (African-American, Italian-American, Jewish-American, Muslim-American) signal acceptance of the fact that political and cultural identities can co-exist without damaging the essential unity of the nation. If, as in the current presidential primary season, major fissures have been exposed, these are based more on economic than on ethnic or religious differences. It is vast inequalities of wealth and not communal affiliations that are dividing the electorate and our politicians in the US right now.

For these reasons, the French obsession with the veil seems to many of us to have taken the form of what Emmanuel Terray diagnosed in 2004 as “political hysteria.” The furious rhetoric, dire warnings, and punitive laws directed at articles of women’s clothing (hijab, voile intégrale, abaya) seem excessive, if not unreasonable. The warning in 1989 from Alain Finkielkraut, Elisabeth Badinter and others that failure to ban the hijab in schools would become “the Munich” of the Republic led some of us to wonder how these supposedly serious intellectuals could so overstate their case. In recent days, Laurence Rossignol’s comment likening wearing the veil to submitting oneself to slavery elicited a similar response—did she have any idea of the history to which she was referring? And when Charlie Hebdo and then the editors of Libération warned of the inevitable slippery slope from the veil to terrorist bombings and condemned as “Islamo-gauchistes” those who denounced their conflation of Muslim customs with political Islam, it was hard not read their texts as exemplifying the very Islamophobia they were so vociferously denying.

The insistence that laïcité requires banning the veil in the name of women’s equality is another troubling aspect of the obsession with Muslim women’s clothing. Those of us who know something of the history of this term are surprised to find it invoked as a principle of gender equality. That was surely not a consideration for the anti-clericals who coined the term in 1871, nor for the authors of the 1905 law. While the 1905 law requires state neutrality in matters of religion, it says nothing at all about how women should be treated. It is instead “la nouvelle laïcité” (so named by François Baroin in 2003 as the headscarf ban was being debated) that attributes a concern for the equality of women and men to the founding principles of the Republic. It is also la nouvelle laïcité that relocates a requirement of neutrality from the state to its citizens, from state offices and state representatives to all public space and to all inhabitants of that space. La nouvelle laïcité demands that individuals understand that religious neutrality, defined as the absence of all but the most discreet signs of religious affiliation, is a pre-requisite for membership in the nation.

From its first usage in 1871 by anti-clerical campaigners, the word laïcité has been a polemical term; then it was aimed at ending the public power of the Catholic church, now it is used to define a Frenchness that excludes Muslims. Both usages of the term have identified women as a particular danger to the Republic. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, these were French women said to be under the influence of priests; in the 21st century, these are Muslim women whose veils signify an unacceptable “defaut d’assimilation,” and an aggressive refusal of the equality said to be a hallmark of the Republic. Finkielkraut put it baldly during an interview with the NY Times: “Secularism has got to prevail,” he insisted. “And we can’t compromise on the status of women….Everything plays out there.” (NYT 03/12/16) ...