Seminar programme

Programme

9:30-10:00. Introduction.

10:00-12:00. Panel 1: Historical origins of the contemporary public sphere

  • Teresa Bejan, 'Hobbes Against Hate Speech'
  • Robert Priest, 'How religious is conscience? Liberté de conscience and the origins of laicité in nineteenth-century France'
  • Alistair Hunter, 'The quest for cohesion on Equality Street: placing Islam in the French municipal cemetery'

Comment: Emile Chabal

13:30-15:30. Panel 2: The crisis of secularism in France

  • Sarah Shortall, 'Exile Catholicism: Anticlericalism and the Birth of the “Nouvelle Théologie” in France'
  • Camille Robcis, 'The biopolitics of dignity and the Catholic origins of French secularism'

Comment: Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

15:30-17:30. Panel 3: Islam and European Identity

  • Mayanthi Fernando, 'Muslim Intimacies and the Cunning of Secular Power'
  • Tim Peace, 'Islamophobia in France: A political consensus?'
  • Joshua Ralston, 'Muslim Migration and the Borders of European Identity'

Comment: Ayça Çubukçu

17:30-18:30. Concluding remarks and future plans

19:30. Dinner

Detailed abstracts are below. The papers are available in a dedicated Google Drive folder.

Panel 1: Historical origins of the contemporary public sphere

Teresa Bejan, 'Hobbes Against Hate Speech'

Scholars often assume that hate speech and religious insult are problems peculiar to modern, multicultural and multi-faith liberal democracies to which the history of political thought has little to say. Yet Thomas Hobbes's analysis of insult or “contumely” prefigures recent developments in political theory in striking—and highly suggestive—ways. This article demonstrates that Hobbes's concerns about the harms in hate speech went well beyond fighting words to the essential role played by expressions of hatred and contempt in ordering social relations and creating, maintaining, and reforming social hierarchies. This sensitivity to contumely’s subtle power to constitute in/equality recalls recent work in feminist and critical race theory. Yet the expansive solutions—both negative and positive, legal and ethical—Hobbes envisioned help shed light on the difficulties faced by tolerant societies today in their own attempts to eradicate contempt and establish the universal acknowledgement of equal respect.

Robert D. Priest, 'Liberté, Laïcité… Cliché? Religious Pluralism and ‘Freedom of Conscience’ in French Political Culture, 1789-1905'

During the last decade or so scholarship from across the humanities and social sciences has persistently undermined received wisdom about the polarities of religion in modern French political culture. On one side, a new historiography of French republicanism has recovered the ‘Catholic’ character of post-revolutionary political thought and even of laïcité itself. Sociologists like Jean Baubérot and historians such as Michael Behrent and Joan W. Scott have variously argued either that French republicanism’s search for unity, uniformity and organic social bonds betrays its Catholic inheritance, or that stereotype of uncompromising state secularism disguises a long history of accommodating Catholicism. On the other side, a revised history of post-revolutionary French Catholicism has argued that it was more accommodating of liberal and democratic ideas than previously imagined. Political theorists like Émile Perreau-Saussine and historians such as Dale Van Kley, Émile Poulat and Vincent Viaene have sketched a new genealogy of Catholic thought within which even the most ‘backward-looking’ and conservative ultramontane ideas are redrawn as constructive responses to a modern, liberal political order. Through a re-evaluation of French political thought on the question of ‘freedom of conscience’ (liberté de conscience) between 1789 and 1905, this paper will ask how far the recent disestablishment of post-revolutionary political culture can be sustained, and what if anything remains distinctive about France’s discourse on religious pluralism in this period.

Alistair Hunter, The quest for cohesion on Equality Street: placing Islam in the French municipal cemetery'

In France, the laws of laïcité separating religion and state extend into the space of the municipal cemetery. These laws, developed in the late 19th century, can be conceived as a means of physically inscribing the founding Republican principles of equality (égalité) and togetherness (fraternité) in the public space, applicable to all citizens regardless of religious persuasion. The municipal cemetery therefore functioned as the proof of an equal and cohesive society, not only in life but also in death: it is no coincidence that the road leading to the municipal cemetery often bears the name Rue de l’Egalité. Yet in more recent times, in a context of post-secularism shaped in part by migration from France’s former colonies, the principle of equality sometimes sits uncomfortably alongside another fundamental value, namely freedom of religious belief and practice. This tension comes to the fore when locating the place of Islam in the French municipal cemetery, as findings from my (primarily qualitative) fieldwork show. At issue is the creation of separate Muslim-only burial sections, which many Muslims view as an essential element of religiously respectful burial practice. While de facto separate sections may be granted at the discretion of municipal authorities, such decisions have a fragile legal basis and may have an unsettling impact on local politics and community cohesion, especially around election time. The place of Islam in France’s cemeteries also reverberates with wider societal debates around cohesion: are particularistic Muslim practices in public space a manifestation of the incompatibility of Islam and Republican laïcité, or should they be viewed instead as proof of the integration, both sociologically and physically, of migrant-origin Muslim families in France?

Panel 2: The crisis of secularism in France

Sarah Shortall, 'Exile Catholicism: Anticlericalism and the Birth of the “Nouvelle Théologie” in France'

At the turn of the twentieth century, France was caught in a battle between the forces of antimodernist Catholicism and anticlerical Republicanism—one that culminated in the separation of Church and state in 1905. Far from bringing an end to the public role of the Church in France, this paper argues that the anticlerical campaign had a productive rather than a destructive effect on Catholic theology. In fact, it provided the intellectual and institutional impetus for one of the most important movements in twentieth-century Catholic theology, known as the “nouvelle théologie,” which eventually became the dominant theological force behind the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. I show how this movement emerged from the seminaries-in-exile created to serve the religious orders that had been evicted from France as a result of the anticlerical legislation. The paper focuses in particular on the Jesuit scholasticate on the Channel island of Jersey, where Henri de Lubac, Gaston Fessard, Yves de Montcheuil, Robert Hamel, and René d’Ouince met and bonded over their shared distaste for the Neo-Scholastic theology that dominated the Church at the time. They perceived it as an unwitting accomplice in the secularization of public life under the Third Republic. Instead, they sought to articulate an alternative vision capable of bridging the chasm between the Church and the modern world that both secular Republicanism and Neo-Scholasticism had conspired to dig. The anticlerical campaign in France thus created the conditions for a major theological renaissance in France during the 1930s and 1940s.

Camille Robcis, 'The biopolitics of dignity and the Catholic origins of French secularism'

My paper traces the genealogy of the notion of “human dignity” in modern French law. My goal is to explain how and why dignity has come to be associated with national belonging and public order, as evidenced for example by the 2010 law banning “face coverings” in public spaces or by the recent pleas to revive “national indignity” after the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. I argue that that the definition of dignity that has been circulating in French law since the 1990s is primarily a corporatist one. Rather than promoting abstract individual freedom, human rights, and democratic inclusion, this understanding of dignity (theoretically much closer to that of political Catholicism and personalism than to the Kantian or liberal understanding of dignity that we see in American law) insists on the obligations that the individual has towards the community, towards the social, and, in its most recent formulations, towards France. Thus, I propose to consider human dignity in the French context not as a value intrinsic to a person but as a project of biopolitical rule.

Panel 3: Islam and European Identity

Mayanthi Fernando, 'Muslim Intimacies and the Cunning of Secular Power'

My paper analyzes secularism and secularity beyond the conventional focus on law and politics, and I argue that like religiosities, secularity – in this case laïcité – includes a range of ethical, sexual, physical, and affective dispositions. That is to say, the organization of public/private involves the organization of bodies and flesh, hence the need to apprehend the secular via its sensory and embodied norms and forms, not just its political and legal ones. I therefore examine the critique of veiling, and the new coding of liberté and égalité as sexual freedom and gender equality, as a way to understand the sexual, aesthetic, and bodily norms of proper religion and proper secularity in France, and the way in which proper religiosity and proper sexuality are constituted together. I end by asking a) whether there might be a relationship – either structural or genealogical – between secularity’s norms about sex/religion and Christianity’s and b) if there is – if Christianity provided and continues to provide the grounds for secularity’s norms, as many scholars posit – what are Muslims and other non-Christians living in secular Europe to do?

Tim Peace, 'Islamophobia in France: A political consensus?'

France is the country in Europe which is often described as having a big problem with anti-Muslim prejudice. Indeed, until relatively recently, many French commentators did not even want to employ the term ‘Islamophobia’. In France, there exists a media and political obsession with the lives of its Muslim citizens who are often put under the spotlight for a supposed lack of commitment to secularism, republicanism and French values. While these debates may be common to many countries with a significant Muslim minority, in France it takes on an added significance because of the almost total consensus across the political spectrum that there is a ‘Muslim problem’ that needs to be addressed. This paper will set out some of the reasons why this consensus exists by pointing to the rise of neo-republicanism and the subsequent race to the bottom amongst politicians to appear tough on visible difference and multiculturalism in the face of increasing support for the far right Front National (FN). It will also discuss how French Muslims themselves are responding to this situation in an increasingly sophisticated manner by challenging discrimination, not just through forms of protest, but also in the courts. Particular attention will be placed on the legal framework and the work of NGOs such as the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) which fight to have acts Islamophobia recognised as hate crimes. In a climate of increasing suspicion in the wake of a spate of terrorist attacks perpetrated on French soil, the paper will also investigate the policy responses to the twin challenges of Islamophobic revenge attacks and the potential further alienation of French Muslims citizens. Finally, the paper will conclude with a reflection on the 2017 Presidential campaign in which the FN candidate Marine Le Pen is expected to perform well.

Joshua Ralston, 'Muslim Migration and the Borders of European Identity'

Drawing on migration studies and critical theory, this paper argues that the ambivalent responses of European legal and political mechanisms to the influx of migrants in 2015 should be located within a longer history of European-Muslim relations. Specifically, I argue that European political theory, be it laïcité, church-state separation, or semi Christian establishment, has been partly constructed over and against a perceived illiberal Muslim body politic. The Spanish border in North Africa and the island of Lampedusa become sites of cultural and political contestation that divide the liberal from the illiberal world. With the movement of a large number of Muslims into Europe in recent years, Western political ideology finds two major features of its identity and practices at an impasse. On the one hand, Europe has longstanding commitments to nurture a political space of liberal tolerance, human rights, religious freedom, and porous borders—including the right to asylum. On the other hand, this tradition has been constructed, both in rhetoric and borders, over and against a perceived illiberal Muslim. The liberal tradition of the Genevan Convention demands legal welcome for the Muslim refugee, even as the longer political ideology of Europe questions the possibility of Muslim integration into and acceptance of political liberalism. The varying responses to the migration crisis from Germany, the U.K., Hungary, and France—and the debates over Dublin IV and shared responsibility—might be better understood as highlighting and employing distinct modalities of this European political and legal history.