Berkley Center

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. More than simply the nation’s motto, to be engraved on government buildings and recited by schoolchildren, these are the three characteristics that every Frenchman believes exemplify what it means to indeed be French. Understanding of the French commitment to liberty, equality, and brotherhood is absolutely necessary in order to begin to integrate into French culture. However, could these values be the reason that integration has become so difficult in recent decades?

Since being signed into law by Jacques Chirac in March 2004, there has been consistent controversy regarding the French law banning ostentatious religious symbols from public elementary and secondary schools. Although the law regards all obvious religious symbols—forbidding everything from a large cross necklace to a turban—the media generally refers to the law as the “French headscarf ban,” since the most-affected demographic appears to be young Muslim girls. France is historically Roman Catholic, with about 65 percent of the population still identifying as such. Nevertheless, many of these Catholics practice a distinctly French version of the religion. This French Catholicism has been significantly influenced by the concept of laïcité, or the idea that one’s religion should be entirely private, and in no way affect public civil society. However, for the approximately five million French Muslims, who are generally much more observant than their Catholic counterparts, to follow the principle of laïcité is a bit more complicated. My traditionally French–Catholic, very politically minded host mother told me at dinner one night that it made her very angry when people allowed their religion to shape their political decisions. “Not everyone has the same religion; it’s better to keep that private, and to let your political decisions be influenced by the public.” For someone whose normative ethical and social beliefs are heavily shaped by his or her religion, though, this separation could be nearly impossible. When this attempted separation results in people not being free to practice their religion—for example, young Muslim girls not being allowed to wear headscarves in school—tension arises.

And so one must ask the question: is the French commitment to laïcité lessening certain people’s liberty, equality, and fraternity? In a way, yes. A certain group of people is losing their liberty in that they don’t have the freedom to practice fully their religion. As such, their rights are not equal to those of people whose religions are not affected by the religious symbols ban. This mandate makes integrating into French society much more difficult, which decreases the level of fraternity.

Nevertheless, before arriving here two and a half weeks ago, I had only ever considered the issue from an American standpoint. In the United States, I think that we often try to achieve equality through liberty—we give people a multitude of freedoms through the Bill of Rights, and specifically the First Amendment. Because everyone has the same level of liberty, we assume that there is equality—which will, in turn, lead to fraternity among citizens. In France, though, they seem to take a different approach—they try to achieve liberty through equality. In a twist on the Hobbesian idea that one must abandon many of his rights in order to live in a better society, the French government takes measures such as the religious symbols ban in order to ensure that every citizen is as equal as possible: regardless of your religion, you are equally unable to exhibit it conspicuously in public schools. (The difficulty of the input is obviously very different for a secular child who is not particularly affected, and a Sikh boy or Muslim girl whose religions mandate the wearing of what are considered by the French government to be conspicuous religious symbols, but the output is the same for everyone: nothing ostentatious.) Because each citizen has been made as equal as possible, they can function within the society without worrying that they have less liberty than any other citizen, all of which will hopefully lead to fraternity.

In many ways, day-to-day life in France is almost identical to what I’m used to in the United States (but with better bread); as such, things such as the religious symbols ban can be shocking. “That would never happen in the States—why on earth do French people accept it?” The answer, of course, is that despite the cultural similarities, the underlying reasoning can be extremely different. When considering the ban with an American, liberty-leads-to-equality mindset, the law seems counter-intuitive and inappropriate. When considering it with the idea that equality leads to liberty, though, it begins to make a strange sort of sense.