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Javier E

An Embattled Public Servant in a Fractured France - The New York Times - 0 views

  • rance is in theory a nondiscriminatory society where the state upholds strict religious neutrality and people are free to believe, or not, in any God they wish. It is a nation, in its self image, that through education dissolves differences of faith and ethnicity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship.
  • This model, known as laïcité, often inadequately translated as secularism, is embraced by a majority of French people. They or their forebears became French in this way. No politician here would utter the words “In God we trust.” The Roman Catholic Church was removed more than a century ago from French public life. The country’s lay model supplants any deity.
  • Mr. Cadène, 39, runs the Laïcité Observatory as its “general rapporteur,” a weighty title for a young man
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  • At the Interior Ministry, where she works, anger has mounted at what is seen as Mr. Cadène’s “laïcité of appeasement,” one that is more concerned with the “struggle against stigmatization of Muslims” than with upholding the Republic against “militant Islamists,” the weekly magazine Le Point reported.
  • Among the disadvantaged “are a majority of French Muslims, even if the situation is evolving,” Mr. Cadène said. The result, as he sees it, is discrimination that is religious and social: the inferior schools in ghettoized neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities mean Muslim children have fewer chances.
  • “As laïcité is a tool to allow us all to live together, whatever our condition, it’s also necessary that we be together,” he said. “That we live in the same places. That we interact. And this happens too rarely.” A lot of schools, neighborhoods and workplaces were very homogeneous, he noted. “This insufficient social mixing spurs fears because when you don’t know the other you are more afraid.”
  • “It would be very dangerous to turn laïcité into a political tool,” he said. “It is not an ideology. It is absolutely not anti-religious. It should be a means to bring people together.”
  • Hakim El Karoui, a Muslim business consultant and senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne, said the problem is that laïcité has many meanings. It can represent the law of 1905, freedom of conscience and the neutrality of the state.
  • Or it can be philosophical, a form of emancipation against religion, a battle for enlightenment against religious obscurantism, something close to atheism. Islam, with its vibrant appeal to young Muslims, then becomes the enemy
  • Mr. Cadène’s views seem broadly aligned with Mr. Macron’s. While condemning the extremist Islamism behind recent terrorist attacks, including the beheading of a schoolteacher, the president has acknowledged failings. In an October speech he said France suffered from “its own form of separatism” in neglecting the marginalization of some Muslims.
  • Draft legislation this month seeks to combat radical Islamism through measures to curb the funding and teachings of extremist groups. It was a necessary step, Mr. Cadène said, but not enough. “We also need a law of repair, to try to ensure everyone has an equal chance.”
  • A law, in other words, that would help forge a France of greater mingling through better distributed social housing, more socially mixed schools, a more variegated workplace. The government is preparing a “national consultation on discrimination” in January, evidence of the urgency Mr. Macron accords this question in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election.
  • In France, saying to someone, “Tell me your laïcité and I’ll tell you who you are,” is not a bad compass.
  • So, I asked Mr. Cadène about his. “It’s the equality before the state of everyone, whatever their conviction. It’s a public administration and public services that are impartial. And it’s fraternity because that is what allows us to work together in the respect of others’ convictions.”
  • He continued: “In theory it’s a wonderful model. But if the tool is not oiled it rusts and fails. And the problem today is that equality is not real, freedom is not real, and fraternity even less.”
  • or many decades the model made French citizens of millions of immigrants, and it remains for many French people of different backgrounds and beliefs and skin color, a noble idea, without which France would lose some essence of itself.
  • “I believe that our Republic is laïque’’ — secular — “and dedicated to social justice, and that laïcité can only survive on that basis.”
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