Jean-Marie Rouart, a prolific French author and, since 1997, a member of the French Academy, published “Secularism is an Illusory Defense against the Islamist Will to Conquer,” in Le Figaro on December 8 and available in English translation here with the author’s permission. While the essay’s starting point is the challenge of Islamism in France and the efforts by the Macron government to address it, it explores a much wider matrix that includes the historical process of secularism, the status of Christianity in France (and, by extension, in the West more broadly), the role of tradition in national identity, and the imperative of the sacred in any culture. This complex array of ideas has implications far beyond France, yet it also indicates how today’s France has become ground zero for the cultural conflicts around secularization, Christianity, and Islam. To understand Rouart’s argument, one needs first to consider this specific context. What makes this topic urgent now?
Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical magazine known for its biting caricatures. Its cartoon portrayals of the Prophet Muhammad prompted repeated terrorist attacks, including one on January 7, 2015, which left 17 people dead. A trial opened this autumn, leading to the December conviction of the 14 defendants (three of whom in absentia). The trial itself revived the memory of the Charlie Hebdo affair with renewed attention to the intertwined topics of radical Islamism and the French commitment to freedom of expression (including blasphemous satire).
Against that background, middle-school teacher Samuel Paty addressed the significance of free speech in his class in suburban Paris and showed his students the controversial Muhammad drawings. As a result he was targeted by Islamists in online attacks, and on October 16 a Muslim refugee from Chechnya attacked and beheaded him. Separately, later that month, a Muslim immigrant from Tunisia attacked and killed three worshippers in the Notre-Dame basilica in Nice. The cultural conflict with Islamism had returned to the forefront of public discussion in France. President Macron forcefully responded to the murders in Nice, upholding the value of freedom against terrorist violence: “If we are attacked once again it is for the values which are ours: freedom, for the possibility on our soil to believe freely and not to give in to any spirit of terror. I say it with great clarity once again today: we won’t surrender anything.” The free Republic faced the fanaticism of religion in the drama of the competition between liberty and superstition.
Macron integrated his response to Islamist violence into previously developed plans for legislation against “separatism,” by which is meant aspirations to establish binding codes of behavior outside of and at odds with the laws of the state. At stake is the concern about the potential development of “parallel societies” in which a version of “Sharia law” would be de facto enforced inside the territory of the French state but somehow outside its rule of law. Macron referred to his plan to work against such separatism in his speech of September 4, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Third Republic, delivered at the Pantheon: “Equality before the law implies therefore that the Republic must always be superior to particularist rules. That is why there will never be in France a place for those, often in the name of a god, and sometimes with the support of foreign powers, who attempt to impose the laws of a group. No, because the Republic is indivisible and does not allow for any separatist adventure. A projected law to combat separatism will therefore be proposed this autumn.”
Defining the problem in terms of “separatism” means insisting on the priority of the values of the Republic, including laicism (secularism) against particularist identity politics. This formulation does not specifically address terrorist violence but instead gives expression to the anxiety that social cohesion was unraveling and separate subcultures might develop, and that they in turn might generate violence. The fact that Macron prefers to speak only generally about “separatism,” without any further specification, rather than explicitly about the failed efforts to integrate specifically Muslim immigrant and immigrant-background communities is reminiscent of the unwillingness of the Obama administration, for example, to name distinctly “Islamist” rather than merely “extremist” violence. Yet the insistence on the inviolable secularism of the Republic and, especially in the wake of the Paty killing, Macron’s underscoring the importance of the right to engage in satires of religion, including Islam, changed the tone of the debate. Protestors overseas in parts of the Muslim world demonstrated against France, viewed as an enemy of Islam, and Turkish President Erdoğan took advantage of the conflict to ratchet up international tensions. (The concurrent renewal of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh exacerbated the tension, with Turkey supporting Shia Muslim–majority Azerbaijan, while France gave its support to the claims of largely Christian Armenia.)
For Macron, it is the Republic as the vehicle of Enlightenment rationalism that stands as a mighty fortress against Islamic particularism, thanks to two historical legacies: the 150 years since Gambetta’s declaration of the Third Republic in 1870 and the tripartite program of 1789: liberty, equality, fraternity. Yet in the Pantheon speech Macron somewhat strangely grounds his defense of the Republic in a much longer and pre-republican history: “The Republic begins . . . long before the Republic itself because its values are rooted in our history.” This can only mean that the French Republic inherited a longer French national history, a pre-republican legacy, as Macron even appeals to De Gaulle, who “evoked the two-thousand-year-old pact between France and the liberty of the world.” Yet that claim of a France of two millennia, heir to Roman antiquity, points to an archive of experience, tradition, and values that is larger and older than the Republic itself. Macron does not explore that difference in any detail, the character of a France more capacious than the Republic, but the question is implicitly posed: are the values of the Republic, narrowly defined, sufficient to withstand Islamist separatism or are other cultural resources needed? Or is republican rationalism in fact insufficient to combat fanaticism? What other cultural legacies might be mined from those two thousand years, if laicism is too meager? This is Rouart’s contention: the doctrine of laicism is alone too little.
It was a coincidence that the Charlie Hebdo trial took place in the midst of the COVID pandemic, but the conflict between Macron’s defense of the Republic—a version of what Habermas labeled Verfassungspatriotismus—and Islamist separatism erupted against the backdrop of the public health emergency, just as the government imposed a series of restrictions in the hope of slowing the spread of the disease. It has been stunning to watch how in France, and by no means only there, rights basic to liberal democratic orders have been abrogated peremptorily by executive orders and with little judicial review: the right to travel, the right to assemble, the right to practice religion, and more. Even if one were to argue that all the restrictions were appropriate and necessary—not a plausible claim—it has become clear how fragile our right to rights has become and how quickly even liberal democratic states can restrict rights.
Yet not all of these illiberal measures have gone unchallenged, and in particular the challenges to the free exercise of religion have become embattled. In the spring, the French government declared that all religious gatherings must be limited to no more than thirty persons—regardless of the size of the place of worship. The French Church was initially unwilling to challenge this excessively one-size-fits-all ruling, but what was perceived as a de facto restriction on access to the Mass generated growing resistance, especially in lay circles and among the Catholic youth. By November, the ruling was challenged in court and eventually replaced with a guideline requiring social distancing, but allowing for larger gatherings where space permits. Religion as a vital component of national life had reasserted itself: in place of the earlier conflict between the Republic and Islamist separatism, an emboldened Catholicism was beginning to challenge the dechristianization of the Republic.
The rethinking of secularism as vital to national identity and the impact of Islam converge in some perspicacious comments by the Archbishop of Lyon, Olivier de Gemay:
Since the beginnings of the Church, Christians have respected temporal power. The Catholic Church prays every Sunday for the political authorities. That said, the relations between Church and State have not always been fully clear. The presence of Islam in today’s France is upsetting the equilibrium of the Law of 1905. Macron recently said to the President of Egypt: “There is nothing above mankind.” One can of course understand the claim; it reflects the fear that parts of Islam want to impose their laws on the Republic. But Macron’s remark is, for me, also revealing of a slippage. We are gradually moving from a laicism understood as the neutrality of the state to a laicism in which atheism becomes something like the religion of the state. However, in my view, atheism is nothing more than a philosophical opinion—certainly respectable—but it has no claim of priority. Those who deny the claim of a first cause or a higher order in the cosmos are not more rational than believers!
This is the context for Rouart’s important essay: the Islamist challenge is not only—as Macron might see it—an assault on the secular Republic but also a challenge to Christianity, part of a long-term competition between the two religions and the cultural values associated with them. The experience of the sacred, so Rouart argues, is an indispensable constituent of any vibrant community, and a generalized loss of faith—the result of laicism—far from leading toward a stable secularism, only opens the door to the new and ascendant religion. Therefore Rouart invokes the transition from the enervated pagan world of late antiquity into the new institutions of Christianity, which potentially anticipates the transition of the erstwhile Christian France and Europe into a new Muslim polity. At stake is not religion as “faith,” a matter of some private belief that has underpinned much of Protestantism, but rather the participation in the objective institutions of sacred celebration, communal religious service, as well as the ability to answer the existential questions of mortality. Yet if laicism, now reconfigured as an assertive atheism, undermines the traditional religious identity of Christian Europe, the outcome, instead of a post-religious Enlightenment, will likely involve, so Rouart claims, an alternative religious hegemony. Atheism is too weak a position, intellectually and affectively, to sustain a culture for very long. Hence the prospect of a so-called “great replacement.”
Rouart points toward a potential transition, if Islam prevails over Christianity; this is similar to the dystopia described by Michel Houllebecq in his novel Submission. Yet both accounts can also be taken less as predictions than as warnings and ex negative appeals to preserve and revive the Western cultural heritage before it disappears irretrievably into a past. As such, Rouart’s account can also be understood as echoing the appeal of Pope Benedict in his Regensburg address and the call to retrieve the legacy of a synthesis of reason and revelation. There are of course more than nuances of differences between Rouart, Houllebecq, and Benedict, but they align in pointing to the centrality of religion in the life of the community and the instability of contemporary Christianity. For Rouart especially there is an appeal to revive the millennia of tradition, the Judeo-Christian legacy, because a purely secularist response to Islam will, he contends, never suffice. The answer must be more than the republican values on which Macron builds his case. In the compelling words of a young Catholic: “There’s no more time to let ourselves come apart, when a community like the Church is threatened, directly by murders in Lyon or Nice, or indirectly by the new lockdown, the individualization, the virtualization of everything: Keeping her united, solid, and strong is an emergency, in an ecumenical dialogue, of course, necessarily. But the Church has no right to let herself be disbanded.”
