Conversations on Europe. "We Are All Republicans": Party Competition and the Production of Nationhood in France’s Face Veil Debate

In 2010—following a year-long nationwide debate over the wearing of the Islamic niqab and burqa—the French government adopted a law that prohibits facial coverings in all public spaces. Most studies attribute this and other restrictive laws to France’s republican secular tradition. The speaker will explore a different explanation in this talk. Drawing from a variety of sources, including interviews with politicians, activists and other public figures, she proposes that the 2010 ban arose in significant part out of French political parties’ struggle to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate politics in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. In particular, she suggests that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France’s major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the agreement thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It conceals ongoing conflict, both between and within political parties, over the precise meaning(s) of French republican nationhood.

Emily Laxer is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research bridges the sociological study of politics, nationalism, immigration and gender to examine how contests for political power shape the way national governments respond to debates around immigrants’ religious signs. She approaches this topic by interrogating the role of state and civil society actors in the contested process of producing nationhood in diverse societies, mainly France and Canada (including Québec). Laxer received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Toronto in December 2015. Her research has been published in "Nations and Nationalism," the "Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies," "Recherches Sociographiques," as well as in edited volumes.