The French government marked the 115th anniversary of the Law on Separation of Church and State on Wednesday by adopting in cabinet a controversial draft law titled Strengthening Republican Principles.
The previous working title, Law Against Islamist Separatism, was dropped in late November because of concern it stigmatised France’s Muslim minority, which comprises close to 10 per cent of the population.
According to a Via Voice opinion poll commissioned by president Emmanuel Macron's La République en Marche party last month, 88 per cent of French people are worried about the rise of Islamism in France and 58 per cent are very worried.
Prime minister Jean Castex presented the new law at a press conference following the weekly cabinet meeting, accompanied by the ministers of the interior, justice and citizenship.
Mr Castex did not use the word Islam until a third of the way through his speech. He began with a detailed description of France’s republican values, in particular laïcité or state-enforced secularism.
These values were threatened by children being withdrawn from school “to receive a sectarian education” by sports associations that engaged in proselytism and by cultural groups under foreign influence, MR Castex said.
“This undermining is often the result of a pernicious ideology whose name is radical Islamism,” Mr Castex said, at last naming the target of the law. “The objective of this ideology is to divide people and spread hatred and violence through society. This is what we call separatism.”
Islamist separatism “is all the more dangerous because it is the manifestation of a conscious, theorised, politico-religious plan whose ambition is to impose religious rules on common law”, the prime minister continued.
Anticipating criticism, Mr Castex added, “This draft law is not a text against religions, nor against the Muslim religion in particular. On the contrary, it is a law of liberty, a law of protection, a law of emancipation from religious fundamentalism.”
Social causes
The left criticises the law for failing to address the social causes that alienate many Muslims. The idea of creating greater diversity in public housing, which often constitutes ghettos for ethnic minorities, was considered but discarded. Mr Castex asked housing minister Emmanuelle Wargon, who is from the left-wing of Macron's majority, to make proposals on the matter.
The new law authorises the immediate arrest of individuals who spread hatred on social media. The so-called "Paty article" was added after schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on October 16th. A Muslim man who objected to the victim showing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in class had posted Paty's name and the address of his school on Facebook.
Once the law passes both houses of the legislature, endangering someone’s life by publishing information that makes it possible to identify or locate him or her will be punishable by up to three years in prison and a €45,000 fine.
Gérald Darmanin, the hardline interior minister, created an outcry this autumn by suggesting that halal food should be banned from supermarkets. Darmanin said the first article of the law forbids all public service workers, even if they do not have civil service status, such as airport and railway employees, from “sectarian behaviour or wearing religious signs”.
The minister did not elaborate but doubtless referred to, for example, bus drivers who wear long beards and the Arab khamis.
Darmanin said prefects would intervene “to impose the values of the republic”, for example by preventing the establishment of separate hours for women in public swimming pools for religious reasons.
Health professionals who issue “certificates attesting to a person’s virginity” may be punished by up to one year in prison and a €15,000 fine.
If officials suspect that a woman is being forced to marry against her will, they must “converse separately with the future spouses” and “notify the prosecutor, with a view to preventing the marriage if doubt continues”.
Specific authorisation
Marlène Schiappa, the minister for citizenship who established her reputation in her previous post as minister for women’s rights, cited an association that says about 200,000 women have been forced into marriage in France. Polygamous men would not be eligible for residence papers, she added. (Polygamy is in any case illegal in France.)
Severe limits on home schooling are among the most contested measures in the law. “In a certain number of cases, [home schooling] is a cover for clandestine Salafist structures,” education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said, referring to the strain of Islam that teaches that Muslims should live as they did in the time of the Prophet.
Parents will have to obtain specific authorisation to home school their children. The only exceptions that will be granted will be because of “the child’s health or handicap, intensive practice of sports or the arts” or parents who are itinerant for professional reasons, Mr Blanquer said.
