Jan 13, 2012
Secularism and public holidays in France
The thorny issue of secularism and religious diversity has entered the (nascent) French presidential race. Eva Joly, a popular Franco-Norwegian public figure who became famous for tackling corruption and environmental abuse as an investigating magistrate, entered the fray this week with a suggestion that the feast days of Yom Kippour and Aïd-el-kebir should be recognised by the State. The candidate for the Europe Écologie-Les Verts party, decried how Sarkozy’s presidency had set back the cause of equality, citing educational “apartheid” and the “undignified” treatment of those living in the disadvantaged banlieues. She advocated measures which would ensure “equal treatment for religions in the public sphere”, including the addition of the Muslim and Jewish public holidays. She argued that in treating religions equally, this would advance rather than offend the distinct French tradition of state secularism or laïcité, in ensuring that public holidays were not attuned exclusively to the Christian calendar.
Predictably, the suggestion prompted a fierce backlash. Reflecting a peculiar feature of French political life, the secularist rejoinder was as sharp on the left as the right (in fact, it was the centre-right Sarkozy, not the socialists, who was initially receptive to proposals to amend the law so as to allow State funding of moderate mosques).
Continuing the themes of their recent nationalist discourses, ministers of the ruling UMP party dismissed the proposal in appealing to France’s “Christian roots” - surely an an incongruous justification given the party’s ardent defence of laïcité, or at least a peculiarly opportunistic interpretation of it. Even less surprisingly, Marine Le Pen of the National Front derided the proposal as embodying “Francophobia” (the Far-Right party had also, previously, criticised Eva Joly’s dual French-Norwegian nationality).
On the Left, the socialist party candidate, Hollande, simply noted that “new public holidays cannot be introduced as a function of religious needs”. The Parti Radical de Gauche claimed Joly had “confused laïcité with communitarian clientelism”, while the rector of the Parisian mosque, while approving the sentiment behind the suggestion, said he doubted whether it was feasible within the framework of French law.
Underlying Joly’s proposal, however, was an awareness that the existing calendar of public holidays is attuned, in large part, to the Christian feast days. Viewed in this light, the appeal to include other religious feasts can hardly be said to undermine a religious “neutrality” of the State which does not actually exist. In fact, the recognition of the same Muslim and Jewish feast days was advocated by the Stasi commission, the body whose report underlay the prohibition on conspicuous religious attire in public schools in 2004. That part of the report was never implemented.
On the other hand, the President of the Radical Left Party argued that the existing public holidays coinciding with Christian holidays had, through history, become “detached” from their original religious significance. However, this hardly changes the fact that the grafting of public holidays to the Christian calendar still benefits Christians over others in real ways. In a broader lens, the delineation of the secular and the religious, for the purpose of identifying state transgressions of this boundary, is notoriously ephemeral and has led various constitutional courts to tie themselves in analytical knots trying to locate it.
Yet Joly undoubtedly touched upon an important point, about how defences of secular “neutrality” in the public sphere often mask appeals to the preservation of culturally specific arrangements, despite the republican, universalist terminologies deployed to resist claims to supposedly “special”, particularist accommodation. Yet the converse problem of her proposal are the intrinsically limited practical horizons within which any equalization of religious accommodation must be performed: how is the State to determine whose, and which religious feast days to include? The proposal isnot be genuinely “neutral”, either, in including only Islam and Judaism, and any broader pluralisation of public holidays would have to use arbitrary criteria of number and power so as to delineate the religions accommodated. Inevitably, it is impossible to religiously-neutralise public calendars in any real way. It was also pointed out that existing administrative dispositions in French law allow public employees to receive leave for religious feast days, although arrangements in the private sector are more irregular.
Yet the real significance of the episode lies in how the reactions to the proposal illustrate the worryingly xenophobic trajectory of French public discourse, and the banalisation of certain ideas of the National Front – as well as the secularist, republican terminologies which these discourses have appropriated.
