French Politics, Culture & Society

The hundredth anniversary of the 1905 law in France on the separation of church and state has led to a rich harvest of new scholarly work on laïcité and religion in public life. Centenaries often inspire conferences and publishing projects, especially in France. In the case of the 1905 law the temptation became irresistible in the wake of the creation of the Conseil français du culte musulman in 2002 (see the special spring 2005 issue of FPCS on the CFCM) and years of controversy over the wearing of Muslim headscarves in public schools. The Stasi Commission’s 2004 recommendation to ban the wearing of ostentatious religious signs in public schools, and a 2005 act of Parliament that made that view law, inspired sharp debate in France and beyond, adding further impetus to scholarly discussion of religion, politics, and the government’s regulation of matters religious.

The question of “civil religion” constitutes the impensé of French secularism,and this is necessarily so due to the term's ideological function. Using Jean-Jacques Rousseau's definition--revisited by sociologists--, this article considersthe relationship between secularism and civil religion at two periods. Duringthe period 1901-1908, two types of secularism opposed each other: the first,close to civil religion, was dominant until 1904; the second, which emerged in1905-1908 (the laws on the separation of Church and State) distanced itselffrom it. The second period is the beginning of the twenty-first century, whenelements of a “lay-Catholic” civil religion are thwarted, however, by severalfactors. In conclusion, the author offers several avenues of comparisonbetween American civil religion and French civil religion.

Religions, genre, et politiques laïques en France, XIXE-XXE siècles

All too often, the question of Muslim minorities in Europe and America is discussedsolely in socioeconomic terms or with a simplistic focus on the Islamicreligion and its purported incompatibility with democracy. This article focusesinstead on the secularism of Western host societies as a major factor in the integrationof Muslim minorities. It compares French and American secularismand argues that while French-style secularism has contributed to present tensionsbetween French Muslims and the French state, American secularism hasfacilitated the integration of Muslims in the United States—even after 9/11.

This article considers the site and space of Les Halles as an ongoing intellectualfascination. It specifically looks at how architects have historically approachedLes Halles as a “site of modernity” and puts into context the most recent renovationand the architectural competition to design Les Halles in 2004-2005.It will consider the projects and their viability from a cultural perspective andopen the question of the site and the city's future form.

Until 1969, when Paris's wholesale food markets were moved to the Parisiansuburb of Rungis, Les Halles, the market district in the center of Paris, fedmuch of the city's urban population. Les Halles was not simply a place wherefood was bought and sold, but also a highly visible and symbolically chargednode of communication between the countryside, the state, and the bodies ofParisian citizens. Due to its centrality and visibility, Les Halles came underenormous pressure to physically symbolize the state's relationship to the “market.”In turn, the architecture of the markets at Les Halles came to stand in forthe powers of the state to organize a flow of goods from farm to body. Fromthe 1763 construction of the Halle au blé, to the 1851 ground-breaking on VictorBaltard's iron and glass market pavilions, to the construction of the CentrePompidou and the Forum des Halles in the 1970s and 1980s, the markets atLes Halles were regularly redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate and/or produceshifting notions of architectural, social, and financial order.

During the Fordist period, the state transformed the historic site of Les Halles,in the heart of Paris, into the agglomeration's chief mass transit gateway.Efforts to make the site into a veritable tool of social, cultural, and economicmetropolitan development are struggling because of governmental modalitiesthat remain very marked by centralism. A majority of citizens, notably thoseliving in suburban Paris, actively stake a claim to this metropolitan dimensionand to the rich possibilities of this tool. The article principally analyzes the territorializingpractices of suburban youths, whose multiple subjectivities arestill poorly integrated into the site. Les Halles thus reveals the question of thecorrespondence of these establishing metropolitan practices to the reality ofthe centralized institutions around Paris intramuros.

While Mayor Bertrand Delanoë had omitted the renovation of Les Halles in hisplans for the city in his 2001 inaugural address, in 2002, at the urging of theRATP and Espace Expansion, he decided to create a working group to undertakethis project during his tenure. Having made citizen participation a newgoal for local government, he also announced that the project would beundertaken with Parisians, especially local associations. The first part of thisarticle emphasizes the different postures that elected politicians, engineers,and experts have adopted over the course of forty years vis-à-vis the questionof citizen participation in urban planning. The second part explores the decision-making process for the Les Halles renovation over the last four years; itconsiders the issues and difficulties linked to the implementation of participatoryplans incorporating residents--whether they are members of localgroups or not--in complex urban planning projects.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet called the three studies resister Germaine Tillion had published in 1946, 1973, and 1988, on the concentration camp to which she had been sent, her “three Ravensbrücks.”4 Although resistance is important in each, these works focus primarily on the relation of exploitation to extermination in the camps. There is, however, a first, or perhaps a fourth, “Ravensbrück,” which is neither a memoir nor a history like the other three. In it, the state of resistance in which Tillion lived her deportation comes to the fore. Inspired by Jacques Offenbach’s L’Orphée aux Enfers, Tillion wrote Le Verfügbar aux Enfers in late 1944 at Ravenbrück, after having spent a year incarcerated there. Like David Rousset’s frequent reference to Père Ubu in L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946), his essay on Buchenwald, Tillion’s operetta reminds us that the genres we usually call on to present the horrific in the normal world may be lacking when the horrific is the norm.

Pascale Goetschel, Renouveau et décentralisation du théâtre 1945-1981 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France [avec le concours du Comité d’histoire du ministère de la Culture et des Institutions culturelles], 2004).

Romain Garbaye, Getting into Local Power: The Politics of Ethnic Minorities in British and French Cities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

Abstracts

Notes on contributors