Epilogue

In July 2007, newly elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy made his first official state visit to sub-Saharan Africa as part of a highly publicized campaign pledge to take Franco-African relations in a new direction. The tour concluded in Senegal, where Sarkozy spoke before hundreds of students at the University of Dakar. After exhorting his young African audience to recognize that French colonialism in Africa had not been wholly bad, Sarkozy outlined the “new” paradigm in Franco-African relations that he envisioned. He declared:

What France wants to embark on with Africa, is to prepare for the coming of Eurafrica, that great common destiny that awaits Europe and Africa.… What France wants to build with Africa is an alliance, an alliance between French youth and African youth so that the world of tomorrow will be a better world.

International reaction to these remarks was swift as critics denounced this speech as rank neocolonialism. Ivorian senate president Mamadou Koulibaly’s stinging rejoinder, “To Eurafrique, no. To Librafrique, yes!,” dominated the headlines of the francophone African press. Nevertheless, French media presented Sarkozy’s Eurafrica as something new, heralding the transfer of responsibility for African development and Africa’s relations with the wider world from a postcolonial French nation-state to a mature institutionalized Europe.¹

In recent years, scholars have used Sarkozy’s Dakar speech as a point of departure for thinking about the politics of Eurafrica in the 1950s.² We would do well to also take note of the venue—a university that the French hastily created on the eve of independence and that remained officially integrated into the French university system until 1968—as well as the audience, a group of francophone college students, an elite social milieu in contemporary Senegal whose particular relationships to France and Europe were not widely shared by the majority of Senegalese or young people in other parts of ex-French Africa.³ As social historians of the region have argued, one of the greatest effects of French colonial education was the creation of new local forms of political domination and social inequality in African societies. As Louis Brenner has written of postcolonial Mali, “the bureaucratic bourgeoisie who inherited the mantle of state power and authority when Mali achieved its independence belonged to an educated social class that was invented during the colonial period primarily through the process of western schooling.”⁴ The concentration of political, military, and economic power in this small cadre of francophone elites, continually supported by French interventions since 1960, has posed a perennial challenge to African democracy.⁵

This book has shown that Sarkozy’s particular appeal to youth in charting a “Eurafrican” future for France and Africa has a long and complicated history that dates to the postwar conjuncture. Postwar French officials approached imperial renewal in Africa and European unity as generational projects that enlisted youth as critical agents in the establishment of new kinds of pluralist, democratic, and postnational polities. To overcome colonial domination in the empire and national division in Europe, French politicians, administrators and educators—in dialogue with francophone African and west European elites—proposed a vast array of education reforms and youth programs in the hopes of stimulating European integration and imperial renewal from the ground up. The proposals shared a good deal in common, despite the radically different political and material situations of postwar French Africa and Western Europe. Both looked to curricular and pedagogical reforms, textbook revisions, new institutions of higher education, and youth and student exchange programs to unite diverse populations. Indeed, French colonial reformers and European unity activists alike hailed the slogan “unity in diversity” as the mantra of their respective projects.

These entangled initiatives to turn African subjects into French citizens and national citizenries in Europe into “Europeans” in the 1940s and 1950s did not produce the desired effects. Implemented unevenly and on a small scale, these initiatives provided formative experiences for small cohorts of future French, francophone African, and West European leaders, but the majority of French people and other Europeans who came of age during this period did not develop a strong European political identity, just as most French and African youth did not forge a shared sense of common destiny. Those outcomes are interconnected. Concerns about holding on to France’s African empire initially restrained French support for robust political union in Europe, and transnational campaigns for European unity helped consolidate an exclusivist vision of Europe that limited the scope and effectiveness of French education reforms and youth initiatives in Africa.

From today’s vantage point, it might seem obvious that these two projects would be intrinsically at odds, but in the dramatic, albeit brief, opening of the postwar conjuncture, the boundaries between the French Republic, French Africa, and the nascent European Community were not yet firmly fixed. This was in fact a pivotal moment when French leaders seriously asked themselves whether Black Africans and African Muslims could be French and European, and what that might mean for republican France and transnational Europe more broadly. One of the central objectives of this book has been to analyze how and why the incompatibility of a Franco-African polity and united Europe became so naturalized—at the very moment when there was an apparent global renunciation of racism and religious discrimination—that this incompatibility now seems like common sense.

The definitions of Europe and European civilization that crystallized in youth and education initiatives in the 1940s construed Europe as raceless (read: white), secular, and culturally Christian. Those founding definitions helped locate France more firmly in Europe and provided a basis for future European integration, even as concrete efforts to create supranational European political institutions in the 1950s faltered. At the same time, those understandings of what it meant to be European contributed to the hardening of conceptions of African racial difference and older oppositions between French and European identity and Islam. The distance between France and Africa was not only widened but also reconstituted: what it meant to be African and what it meant to be European came to be defined against each other in the postwar period in powerful and enduring new ways.

That new conceptual repertoire influenced how French officials evaluated initiatives for young Africans in metropolitan France, the African Federations, and the wider international arena in the 1950s. French officials interpreted the disappointing results of their efforts as confirmation of unbridgeable “civilizational” boundaries and the incommensurability of African difference, rather than the consequence of the officials’ own policies and lack of political will to make the kind of material investments needed for these efforts to truly succeed. And so, despite the fact that French imperial governance was indeed becoming more democratic in certain ways, officials’ own negative assessments of their programs and policies for African youth contributed to a growing fatalism in the mid-1950s that France’s postwar empire was destined to dissolve along racial and religious lines. The critical interplay between colonial and European youth initiatives is therefore key to explaining why, despite France’s efforts to strengthen ties with its African colonies in the 1940s and 1950s, France became both more French and more European during precisely those years.

The divergent fates of the “unity in diversity” rhetoric that had been a hallmark of postwar youth and education policy in both the colonial African and transnational European spheres bring the legacies of that interplay into focus. Even now, as the fallout of the 2008 financial collapse and the 2015 European refugee crisis continues to throw the foundations of the European project into doubt, “united in diversity” remains the official motto of the European Union. The motto has perhaps lost some of its potency in these increasingly unsettled, post-Brexit times. Nevertheless, that rhetoric still exercises a powerful grip on the political imagination of most mainstream politicians and intellectual elites on the continent today, who continue to believe that the vision of “Europeans united in their diversity” is both possible and eminently desirable.⁶ And while frustration with, indifference to, and in some cases outright contempt for the EU power structure in Brussels continues to rise, the enduring success of the ERASMUS student exchange program indicates that young people’s disenchantment with political Europe has not turned them off from helping to build a transnational European civil society.⁷ In 2013–2014, more than half of the thirty thousand United Kingdom students who studied abroad did so through ERASMUS.⁸ Consistently high British annual enrollment in the program perhaps helps explain why fully three-quarters of Britons under twenty-four voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum.⁹ ERASMUS has been an even greater success in continental Europe; since its creation in the late 1980s, more than five million students have participated in the program.¹⁰ In 2014, the EU committed 14.7 billion euros to the new ERASMUS Plus initiative, which has since enabled four million more European university students to study abroad within the EU.¹¹

The postwar movements for united Europe envisioned just this kind of program and Europeanized universities as a crucial complement to institutions like the Common Market. As French academic and delegate Michel Mouskhély put it before the Council of Europe in 1956, Europe-wide student exchanges and transnational universities would endow Europe with its own “spiritual infrastructure,” a necessary corollary to economic integration for rising and future generations to “feel European.”¹² Though a proper European university did not come into being in the immediate postwar years, the early pro-Europe movements did establish the College of Europe in Bruges in 1950, which continues to train top EU personnel today. The movements also laid the groundwork for the eventual creation of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. Since the EUI opened its doors in 1971, it has played a central role in producing transnational European networks of academics, researchers, and students who have helped delineate a distinct European research sphere.¹³ ERASMUS, the College of Europe, and the EUI—as well as an increasingly robust EU information policymaking apparatus that has developed since the 1960s—are all continuing the work of “uniting Europeans in their diversity” in the present.¹⁴

We would search in vain for a similarly optimistic framework for Franco-African relations today, as suggested by Sarkozy’s maladroit resurrection of Eurafrica in Dakar in 2007 and current French president Emmanuel Macron’s more recent reprise of Eurafrica in spring 2018.¹⁵ The collapse of an overarching formal political-institutional relationship between postcolonial France and ex-French Africa in the 1960s has rendered the slogan “united in diversity” meaningless in that context. However, that rhetoric has also been abandoned with regard to diversity within France, even as the number of Africans and children of African descent born in France has risen into the millions. While the multicultural ethos of “unity in diversity” had always been rejected by the nationalist Far Right, since the 1980s a growing cadre of ultrarepublican intellectuals have assailed those values with equal vehemence, charging that identity politics, what they call “communitarianism,” is eroding the foundations of the French Republic.¹⁶ This is in stark contrast to postwar aspirations for a more pluralist republic.

For the past three decades, French debates about pluralism have centered largely on the supposed failure of the republican school to integrate the descendants of France’s ex-colonial populations into contemporary French society. In the mid-2010s, a spate of sensational acts of terror forced France’s leadership class to confront a starker reality. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks in January 2015, French interior minister Manuel Valls defied a deep-seated French taboo against explicit references to race in his characterization of the spatial segregation between wealthy and poor, “native” French people and communities of “immigrants” and their descendants, as a state of “geographic, social and ethnic apartheid.”¹⁷

While Valls’s blunt allusion to apartheid stunned French pundits at the time, the analogy had been put forth a decade earlier by prominent leftist theorist and philosopher Étienne Balibar in an important essay, “Droit de cité or Apartheid?” In that piece, Balibar reflected not only on the ethnicization and “recolonialization” of immigrants in France but also on the way that stipulations in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty restricting “European citizenship” to citizens of EU member-states created a fundamentally new register of exclusion for noncitizen residents of Europe. The result was a specifically European form of racism and the production of an amorphous category of “less than white” for populations who were not white, Christian, or secular. The danger, Balibar warned, was that those populations would become a permanent underclass, effectively instantiating a system of “European apartheid.”¹⁸

Balibar’s reflections are part of an ongoing conversation among social scientists about how the evolving juridical framework of the European Union and revived efforts to define Europe in civilizational terms has shaped and will continue to shape the ability of former colonial subjects and their descendants to claim political and cultural membership in the national communities of their ex-metropoles.¹⁹ This conversation has centered overwhelmingly on Islam. In an important essay originally published in 2004, anthropologist Matti Bunzl argued that Islamophobia has replaced anti-Semitism as the dominant logic of exclusion in contemporary Europe as the continent has transitioned from a national to a postnational order. If Jews once represented the archetypical Other of European nation-states, Bunzl claims they now constitute the veritable embodiment of European postnationality, whereas observant Muslims are construed as an existential threat to the secular, liberal “European civilization” that is presumed to anchor the supranational EU.²⁰ Bunzl bases this argument on the evolution of the explicit politics of exclusion peddled by extreme Right movements across the continent that have largely abandoned outright anti-Semitism in favor of attacks on Islam as fundamentally incompatible with Europe’s “Judeo-Christian humanist culture.”²¹ However, if we shift our focus to the aspirational politics of inclusion in the European mainstream, as this book has done for the early postwar era, the deeply ambiguous position of the “Judeo” in that formulation rises to the forefront.

Jews occupy a liminal place in the story I have told here, a kind of present absence. If reason and common sense lead us to assume that the attempted destruction of European Jewry must have been a key subtext of postwar efforts to combat racism and religious persecution, we are nevertheless confronted with postwar policymakers’ near-absolute silence on the matter.²² How Jews might fit in a united Europe, or the place of Jews and Judaism in European history, was simply not discussed in transnational European forums on youth and education after the war. To the contrary, “European civilization” was explicitly defined as both Christian and secular, and secularism itself was construed as a Christian invention. As we saw in chapter 2, in one of the rare instances when actual Jews were mentioned in postwar French debates about state funding for private religious education, education officials insisted that French Jews had been “Christianized” precisely insofar as they had become French and secular.²³ If that was the true basis of the inclusion of Jewish survivors in the postwar republic, it follows that as Jewish religiosity has experienced a dramatic revival in France in recent years, Jews’ place in the republic has been thrown into question once more.²⁴

The legacy of the culturalization of Christianity in the postwar era is an unambiguous double standard in how Christianity and other faiths are treated in both contemporary France and Europe more broadly. In 2004, the French legislature passed a law banning students from wearing “ostentatious” religious symbols or religious dress in public schools. As many observers have noted, this law disproportionately affects, and indeed intentionally targeted, Muslim schoolgirls who wear the hijab, or Islamic headscarf.²⁵ The successful passage of this law was the culmination of fifteen years of heated public debate after a principal in the suburbs of Paris dismissed two Muslim students for wearing the hijab in his establishment in 1989. This incident proved to be the first of a series of so-called “Headscarf Affairs,” in which a specifically Muslim religious practice was construed as incompatible with the bedrock republican principle of laïcité.

And yet, another controversy over questions of religion and education in France seemed to point to significant countervailing trends in public sentiment just a few years earlier. In 1983, Alain Savary, then minister of education in the Socialist government of François Mitterrand, proposed a law that would have forced all religious schools to adopt the public school curriculum and require teachers in religious schools to have the same credentials as their public school counterparts. Catholic leaders, educators, and parents vociferously denounced this proposal. The bill sparked massive grassroots mobilizations across the country, with between one and two million people participating in demonstrations in Paris alone.²⁶

The postwar culturalization of Christianity helps explain the radically different ways opponents of these two measures have been represented in the French public imagination. While those who defend the rights of Muslim girls to wear the headscarf in public schools were and continue to be subject to attacks that question their patriotism and their identity as truly French, the national loyalties and “Frenchness” of opponents to Savary’s law were rarely challenged in mainstream public debate. Significantly, “French” was not the only relevant category in the controversy. Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was then a member of the European Parliament, went a step further, denouncing Savary’s Law as un-European. In an appeal to parents and teachers to mobilize for the “freedom of education,” Le Pen cast France as a bastion of Communist unfreedom in an otherwise pluralist, tolerant Europe: “The European Parliament gives us the opportunity to show all of Europe that, in the face of the progress of liberty and the examples of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, Socialist France chose the Gulag and the sinister concatenation: École Unique, Parti Unique, Dictature.”²⁷ In the end, the government not only retracted the bill, but Mitterrand himself went on French national television—on Bastille Day no less (July 14, 1984)—to publicly request Savary’s resignation. During this unusually public and symbolic dismissal of a cabinet member, Mitterrand declared his decision was motivated by overwhelming opposition to the bill; the protests had made clear to him that a significant segment of the French population did not approve of the measure, and he did not want to go against the wishes of “the people.”²⁸

A similar pattern has emerged at the European level in recent decisions handed down by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In July 2014, the ECHR upheld a 2010 French law that banned women from wearing the burqa and the niqab in public. The ECHR found that there had been no violation of individuals’ rights to family and private life (article 8 of the European Convention) or respect for freedom of thought, conscience, and religion (article 9). The ECHR also ruled that the prohibition of discrimination (article 14) had not been violated with regard to either article 8 or 9. While acknowledging that the ban clearly “interfered” with individuals’ rights to privacy and freedom of religion, the ECHR nevertheless declared that those infractions were justified in view of the higher purpose of the law “to ensure the conditions of living together.” Specifically, the ECHR decision in S.A.S. v. France cited “public safety” and “the protection of the rights and freedoms of others” as legitimate concerns to that end.²⁹

Three years earlier, the ECHR’s decision in Lautsi and Others v. Italy upheld an Italian law that requires crucifixes to be displayed in public school classrooms.³⁰ The law had been challenged by secular Italian parents in Abano who protested that the crucifixes violated Italy’s own secular laws, as well as their rights to freedom of conscience (again, article 9) and to educate their children according to their own convictions (article 2, provision 1). The ECHR ruled that there was no violation of either article because there was no evidence that the presence of crucifixes in classrooms had any actual influence on pupils. The ECHR accepted the Italian government’s position that though the crucifix was a religious symbol, it was a symbol of Christianity, not Catholicism, and so it served as a point of reference for other creeds. The ECHR also accepted the Italian government’s contention that the crucifix was also more than a religious symbol; it was a historical and cultural representation that had “identity-linked value” for “the Italian people,” insofar as it “represented the historical and cultural development characteristic [of Italy] and in general the whole of Europe.” The crucifix, the ECHR concluded, was “a good synthesis” of that development.³¹

The juxtaposition of S.A.S v. France and Lautsi v. Italy has become a focal point of interdisciplinary scholarly debate on European pluralism in recent years. Political scientists Christian Joppke and François Foret have pointed to these cases as an indication of a broader “culturalization of religion” in contemporary Europe.³² By locating that process in the present, they suggest this is a fundamentally new, dangerous retreat from a well-established, institutionally instantiated, and equitable European religious pluralism. Conversely, anthropologist Saba Mahmood argues the cases illustrate a perennial, structural feature of modern secularism: the state’s capacity to define the contours of “religion” according to the values of the majority religion at the expense of religious minorities.³³ For Mahmood, whose work focuses on Egypt, this is neither historically nor culturally specific to Europe. Historians, on the other hand, insist the cases are indeed the consequence of longer historical processes, which they most often associate with the Cold War. Samuel Moyn contends that the ECHR, which was born of conservative Christian Democratic politics in the 1950s, reflects not only the legacy of an exclusionary European secularism but also an exclusionary legacy of European hostility to secularism, rooted in the conflict between the “Christian West” and the Communist secular East.³⁴ Joan Scott also traces a seminal shift in European attitudes toward secularism to the Cold War, but for her that shift was not a rejection of secularism but rather the conflation of secularism and Christianity in a united front against Communist atheism.³⁵ Despite their differences, both Moyn and Scott argue that with the end of the Cold War, Islam simply took Communism’s place as Christian/Christian-secular Europe’s existential threat and Other.

All these insights are largely borne out in the interconnected history of decolonization and early European integration detailed in this book, even if my framing shifts certain emphases in important ways. Rather than a generalized culturalization of religion tout court, I have argued that a confluence of historical developments in the immediate postwar years contributed to the culturalization of European Christianity in particular. Secular European regimes may have always constituted themselves in relation to Christianity, but the postwar conjuncture created conditions to do so in new ways. Those conditions, I have argued, were bound up with contingent and entangled processes of postwar reconstruction, European integration, and decolonization. To be sure, those processes were all also profoundly linked to the Cold War, but none of them can be reduced to Cold War logics alone. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, as James Chappel, Darcie Fontaine, Elizabeth Foster, and Udi Greenberg have shown, Christians themselves fiercely debated the contours of European religious pluralism and the identity of Christianity and European culture as they confronted the rise of fascism and anticolonialism. Christians’ positions may have often aligned with Cold War imperatives, but they had their own agendas.³⁶ As many of those same Christians became involved in the projects of imperial renewal and European unity, they brought those agendas with them into the world of postwar colonial and European youth and education policy and programs, where the ambitions and aspirations of Christian and non-Christian French, African, and other West European politicians, officials, educators, students, and youth leaders collided and converged. Understanding that world therefore gives us a fuller account of the emergence of a distinctly cultural, secularized Christianity in both late twentieth-century France and Europe more broadly.

The complex interplay between discourse and practice in that world produced a fundamentally new, specifically postwar racial common sense that widened the distance between France and Africa and cast Africanness and Europeanness as diametrically opposed. Postwar racial common sense fatally undermined the new French Union, which many French and African leaders alike hoped would turn the page on France’s colonial past and transform the empire into a new kind of multiracial democracy. Forged at the crossroads of the tangled imperatives of colonial reform and European unity, postwar racial common sense located France more firmly in a Europe that desperately wanted to see itself as raceless. The drive toward racial erasure in Europe encouraged representations of African protest over ongoing structural and everyday racism in both France and French Africa as racist. Contemporary discourse about “anti-white racism” emerged from these postwar dynamics. In France today, French students of color—who since the early 2010s have mobilized across the country on an unprecedented scale and have been shining a spotlight on systemic racism in French education in particular—are frequently disparaged in this way.³⁷ Reactions to activism by students of color, like broader debates about race and racism in contemporary France more generally, still tend to be framed in national terms, as scholars and pundits alike invoke a distinctly French tradition of colorblind universalism with ritualistic precision. However, much like contemporary iterations of republican laïcité, French colorblindness in its current form has a much more complex, conjunctural, and transnational origin story at the crossroads of late colonialism, European integration, and decolonization. The study of postwar youth and education initiatives across metropolitan French, colonial African, and transnational European contexts reveals that though French and European officials learned to rhetorically denounce religious and racial discrimination in powerful new ways in the wake of World War II, their practices and policy choices laid the groundwork for the processes of exclusion and the structural inequalities that continue to organize politics and social life in France, ex-French Africa, and the EU today.

1. 1. “Nicolas Sarkozy propose aux Africains de faire ‘l’Eurafrique,’ ” Reuters, July 7, 2007.

2. 2. Gary Wilder, “Eurafrique as the Future Past of ‘Black France’: Sarkozy’s Temporal Confusion and Senghor’s Postwar Vision,” in Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), ed. Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall, 57–60; Muriam Haleh Davis, “Producing EurAfrica: Development, Agriculture and Race in Algeria, 1958–1965” (PhD diss., New York University, 2015), 103–104.

3. 3. Tony Chafer has argued that the creation of the University of Dakar in 1958 was a desperate bid on the part of the French to keep postcolonial African elites oriented toward France. See his The End of Empire in French West Africa. The University of Dakar ultimately broke with the French university system in the wake of massive student uprisings in spring 1968. See Aboudlaye Bathily, Mai 68 à Dakar, ou la révolte universitaire et la démocratie (Paris: Editions Chaka, 1992) and Hendrickson, Decolonizing 1968.

4. 4. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, 13–14.

5. 5. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

6. 6. On the contemporary cultural politics of European integration, see Ekavi Athanassopoulou, ed., United in Diversity? European Integration and Political Cultures (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008); Monica Sassatelli, Becoming Europeans: Cultural Identity and Cultural Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Michael Bruter, Citizens of Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

7. 7. In classic Eurocratese, ERASMUS stands for the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, as well as invoking the early modern Dutch philosopher.

8. 8. Aisha Gani, “UK Students Increasingly Opting to Study Abroad,” Guardian, May 27, 2015.

9. 9. A majority of Britons ages 25–49 also voted to stay. For a complete breakdown of the Brexit vote by age, see Hortense Goulard, “Britain’s Youth Voted to Remain,” Politico—Europe Edition, June 25, 2016.

10. 10. By contrast, only 325,000 foreign students have participated in Fulbright exchanges worldwide since 1946. “Fulbright Community,” Fulbright US Student Program, accessed May 4, 2021, http://us.fulbrightonline.org/fulbright-community.

11. 11. “Key Figures,” Erasmus+, accessed May 4, 2021, https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/about/key-figures_en.

12. 12. Les universités et la communauté spirituelle de l’Europe, Rapport présenté par Michel Mouskhély, Assemblée consultative du Conseil de l’Europe, Commission des questions culturelles et scientifiques, 2ème Réunion Spéciale a/s universités européennes, June 11–13, 1956, AN: 70AJ/27.

13. 13. As Jean Palayret has shown, a European university had been one of the earliest demands for European intellectual and cultural cooperation from the European movements. See his Une université pour l’Europe: Préhistoire de l’Institut Universitaire Européen de Florence, 1948–1976 (Présidence du Conseil des Ministres de l’Union européenne, 1996).

14. 14. Oriane Calligaro, Negotiating Europe: EU Promotion of Europeanness since the 1950s (New York: Palgrave, 2013).

15. 15. On Macron’s more recent usage, see Édouard de Mareschal, “Immigration: les thèses à rebours de Stephen Smith, l’africaniste cité par Macron,” Le Figaro, April 16, 2018.

16. 16. Pierre-André Taguieff and Alain Finkielkraut are key examples. For an excellent analysis of the evolution of Taguieff’s thought, see Chris Flood, “Nationalism or Nationism? Pierre-André Taguieff and the Defense of the French Republic,” South Central Review 25, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 86–105, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40211281.

17. 17. Cited in Sylvia Zappi, “Manuel Valls, l’apartheid et les banlieues,” Le Monde, January 26, 2015.

18. 18. Etienne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 44.

19. 19. See, for instance, Asad, Formations of the Secular; Douglas Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

20. 20. Matti Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: Prickly Pear Press, 2007). For a more recent spin on this argument, see Dorian Bell, “Europe’s ‘New Jews’: France, Islamophobia, and Antisemitism in the Era of Mass Migration,” Jewish History 32 (2018): 65–76, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-018-9306–4.

21. 21. Bunzl cites Dutch nationalist Pim Fortuyn’s use of this phrase as an example. Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 38.

22. 22. Sam Moyn has famously explored this issue with regard to postwar human rights. See his The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

23. 23. This dovetailed with many survivors’ own sublimation of their Jewish identities in the immediate postwar era. See Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). We might then say that postwar French Jews were doubly disappeared, from within and from without.

24. 24. For an excellent discussion of racial and religious identity among Jewish youth in private Jewish schools in contemporary France, see Kimberly Arkin, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in Contemporary France (Stanford University Press, 2013).

25. 25. Keaton, Muslim Girls and the Other France; Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

26. 26. “La ‘manif pour tous’ est le troisième plus gros cortège depuis 1984,” Le Monde, last accessed January 27, 2020, http://charts-datawrapper.s3.amazonaws.com/QdQTZ/fs.html.

27. 27. Open Letter from Jean-Marie Le Pen to parents and teachers, June 6, 1984. AHC: Fonds Savary, 3/SV/70.

28. 28. The presidential address can be viewed on YouTube: “JA2 20H: Emission du 14 Juillet 1984,” INA Actu, published July 2, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JECJemPrYRo. Alain Savary homed in on the hypocrisy of his opponents’ posturing with regard to religious pluralism in personal reflections after his resignation. In a forty-five-page unpublished manuscript, he wrote: “It was discomfiting to listen to the highest authorities of Catholic education insist that they would happily see the creation of Muslim schools, like the Jewish schools founded after the return of North African Jews.… Isn’t this at its core, with these ghetto schools, a good way to definitively manage the problem of schooling immigrants, especially Muslims, the least accepted by all those who are ‘not racist, but …?’ ” Savary, “Après la bataille,” undated, AHC: Fonds Savary, 3/SV/70.

29. 29. Press release issued by the Registrar of the Court, ECHR 191, July 1, 2014. http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng-press?i=003-4809135-5861652.

30. 30. For a slightly different juxtaposition and interpretation of the politics of Muslim garb and crucifixes that focuses on France and Germany in the 1990s from a transnational European perspective, see Leora Auslander, “Bavarian Crucifixes and French Headscarves: Religious Signs and the Postmodern European State,” Cultural Dynamics 12, no. 3 (2000), 283–309, https://doi.org/10.1177/092137400001200302.

31. 31. ECHR, Judgment in the Case of Lautsi and Others v. Italy, Strasbourg, March 18, 2011, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/app/conversion/pdf/?library=ECHR&id=001-104040&filename=001-104040.pdf.

32. 32. Joppke, The Secular State Under Siege; François Foret, Religion and Politics in the European Union: the Secular Canopy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

33. 33. Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age, 168–169. Mahmood’s approach draws heavily on Talal Asad’s foundational Formations of the Secular. For a critique of this intellectual tradition (which also cites the Lautsi case), see Udi Greenberg and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Is Religious Freedom a Bad Idea?,” Nation, March 16, 2016.

34. 34. Moyn, “From Communist to Muslim.”

35. 35. Scott, Sex and Secularism.

36. 36. Chappel, Catholic Modern; Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity; Foster, African Catholic; Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants” and “Protestants, Decolonization, and European Integration.”

37. 37. This has been an effective strategy to discredit and demonize movements like the 2016–2018 “Camps d’été décolonial” in Paris and Reims and “Paroles non blanches” (PNB) events that began at the Université de Paris-8 in Saint-Denis. On the PNB, see “Paroles non blanches : rencontres autour des questions de race, travail et mobilisation,” Paris-Luttes.info, April 12, 2016, https://paris-luttes.info/paroles-non-blanches-rencontres-5334?lang=fr. On the decolonial summer seminars, see “Camp d’été décolonial,” Facebook community, accessed November 14, 2021, https://m.facebook.com/cedecolonial/.