Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
6 - Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
Summary
And you think that the ‘Écoles libres’ teach their pupils to detest the freemasons and the Jews … It is true that, for some years now, in the world that comes out of these schools one no longer receives Jews, which does not matter to us in itself, but which signals that dangerous mentality from which the Affair, etc. grew. But I tell you that in Illiers, the small community where my father presided over the distribution of prizes the day before yesterday, one has not invited the priest to the distribution of prizes since the laws of Ferry came into effect. They habituate the pupils to consider those who visit the priest as people that they should avoid, and in this respect, just like those on the opposite side, we are working to create two Frances … The Christian spirit will not be destroyed if we close the Christian schools, and if it is inclined to die … it will do so even under theocratic rule (Proust 1903: Correspondance III, 382, 386, my translation).
In brief, this world is ‘secular’ not because scientific knowledge has replaced religious belief (that is, because the ‘real’ has at last become apparent) but because, on the contrary, it must be lived in uncertainly, without fixed moorings even for the believer, a world in which the real and the imaginary mirror each other (Asad 2003: 64-65).
Towards a genealogy of the laïcité-religion framework
This chapter traces the historical particularity of the laïcité-religion framework to its intellectual, political and cultural backgrounds in the early French Third Republic (1870-1914). This is the same period of time that formed the background to the Dreyfus Affair. I concentrate on the occurrence of several neo-Kantian and modernist schemes in French political culture in the early Third Republic. I analyse four political cartoons from the time of the installation of the separation between Church and State in 1905 and further scrutinise the ways in which the relation between modernity, secularity and religion appears in the work of neo-Kantian scholars and politicians such as Charles Renouvier, Ferdinand Buisson and Émile Durkheim, who were dealing with religion and education around the time of the introduction of laïcité as a principle of the French state.
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- Information
- Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of MulticulturalismFrench Modernist Legacies, pp. 203 - 224Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013