French Politics, Culture & Society 

About: French Politics, Culture & Society is an academic journal published by Berghahn Books. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Empire. It has an ISSN identifier of 1537-6370. Over the lifetime, 375 publications have been published receiving 2380 citations. The journal is also known as: FPC & S & Journal of the Conference Group on French Politics and Society.

The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France

Abstract: A researcher or a journalist trying to compare the situation of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States and in France immediately confronts a crippling obstacle. The concept of ‘ethnic and racial minority’ as such is not used in France. This is not simply a matter of vocabulary –something the French typically like to argue about; the problem rather lies in the very incomparability of populations that one is talking about. Many of the categories that do exist in political discourse and public debate can of course be found in statistics. But there are no data describing the situation of minorities in France that could be compared with those produced in the United States. This state of affairs in French statistics – gathering has been the subject of major criticism for some 20 years now; it has gotten to the point that it has triggered a controversy of rare violence between those that would like to see statistics take into account the diversity of the population and those who denounce the danger that such statistics might pose of ethnicizing or racializing society. The media focus on the contentiousness of this debate has been such as to sometimes lose sight of the very existence of discrimination and the flaws of the Republican model that are at the root of the controversy in the first place.

Symptomatic Politics: The Banning of Islamic Head Scarves in French Public Schools

Abstract: The events that became known as the affaires de foulard began on 3 October 1989, when three Muslim girls who refused to remove their head scarves were expelled from their middle school in the town of Creil, about thirty miles outside of Paris. The headmaster, Eugene Cheniere, claimed he was acting to enforce laicite—the French version of secularism. According to Cheniere, la'icite—a concept whose meaning would be furiously debated in the months and years that followed—was an inviolable and transparent principle, one of the pillars of republican universalism. The school was the cradle of laicite, the place where the values of the French republic were nurtured and inculcated. It was, therefore, in the public schools that France had to hold the line against what he later termed \"the insidious jihad.\"' The expulsion of the three girls drew extensive press coverage. In these accounts, the head scarf (le foulard) quickly became the veil (le voile), or more dramatically, the tchador, this last evoking the specter of an Iranian-style Islamic revolution. Predictably, perhaps. Catholic leaders (as well as Protestant and Jewish) joined their Muslim counterparts in decrying the expulsions, arguing that laicite meant respect for and toleration of religious differences among students. Less predictable was the split between the two leading antidiscrimination groups, one of which condoned, the other of which deplored the expulsions, both in the name of laicite.'^ Demonstrations organized by Islamic fundamentalists to support the girls from Creil exacerbated things; pictures of heavily veiled women marching to protect their \"liberty\" and their \"honor\" only reinforced the idea of revolutionary Islam on the rise. The voices of calm and reason—those pointing out, for example, that fundamentalists represented only a tiny minority of French Muslims, or that the number of