Harvard students tend to celebrate diversity. For ten months of the year, we live in the most colorful place on earth: a campus wallpapered with advertisements for events that venerate difference, planned by groups that define their membership along ethnic, religious, or cultural lines, and whose shared aim is to promote “intercultural and race relations.”

Every few years, however, some uppity editorialists take it upon themselves to challenge the status quo. How productive is it, they ask, to stubbornly ensure that every minority—visible or otherwise—has an insular campus organization all its own, safely cordoned off from the rest of the student body? A brief campus-wide comic opera ensues, as the officers of the maligned cultural groups write angry letters expressing their collective disappointment at their peers’ lack of sensitivity. The matter is hotly debated on email lists for a few days, until the dozen or so people with the time and energy to participate lapse in their tirades just long enough for everyone else to forget the whole affair.

What a shock, then, to arrive in a country where the prevailing attitude vis-à-vis ethnic and cultural difference is precisely the opposite.

In France, identity is not the sensitive subject that it is in the United States. The delicate balancing of competing identities that occupies so many Americans does not take place here; one does not speak of being African- or Asian-French, for example. If one is French, one is just that, end of story. Unlike at Harvard, where recognizing the diversity of our peers is strictly de rigeur, the French demand that their fellows keep their origins to themselves. As one legislator rhetorically asked on the floor of the French senate in 2004, “must we always call attention to that which divides us, or is it better, rather, to reinforce that which makes us alike?” He wouldn’t have lasted half an hour in Harvard Square.

When news of France’s proposed ban on students’ wearing “ostentatious” religious symbols inside public schools reached the United States in 2003 and 2004, politically-correct denizens reacted with alarmed incomprehension. “The proposed law is an unwarranted infringement on the right to religious practice,” declared Kenneth Roth, executive director of New York-based Human Rights Watch. The New York Times stated that the then-proposed measure would only exacerbate the problems it was meant to resolve. “That was why the West embraced the concept of a separation of church and state to begin with,” the Times argued. “Because every attempt by one religion or ideology to dictate its precepts on others led to only greater problems.”

American critics of the headscarf ban fancied themselves as principled defenders of religious freedom and of the separation of church and state. The law, they claimed, was at best a perversion of basic legal principles, cloaked in republican ideology. Most commentators in the United States lined up in defence of the liberal pluralism in which we North Americans are schooled from birth. But the defensiveness with which Americans reacted to the ban reflects a gulf that goes much deeper than the relative strength of one’s commitment to defending religious freedom.

The difference is not one of conviction but, rather, of confidence. French politicians believe they can live up to their own ideal—an orthodox rendering of republican neutrality and secularity. They are confident in their ability to scrub the markers of religious affiliation from the espace public without jeopardizing religious freedom in the private sphere. Americans, by contrast, are not.

The United States, cursed by a racist past and a religious present, has stumbled into fearing its own “melting pot.”

There is certainly no shortage of possible explanations for the differences in American and French social policy. But what lurks behind the social science is a basic uneasiness on the American side of the pond about forcing individuals into any sort of public conformity. In a country where a single religion, Christianity, is overwhelmingly dominant, and where governments dabble in “faith-based initiatives” to make political hay, it’s understandable that one would recoil at policies meant to subdue difference. What would become of the United States, after all, if the apparatus of the state, controlled by the “Christian right,” were endowed with the power to quash any form of religious expression? In conventional American wisdom, the road to theocracy is paved with good intentions, and the universalism that defines the French republican ethos seems more than a little totalitarian. In fact, it’s more or less just Gallic stubbornness; the French believe that the moment they stop maintaining laïcité, which translates very roughly as the secularism of the public sphere, the Republic will cease to exist. If that means insisting on a certain idea of how the citoyen looks, then so be it.

There’s a downside to this surfeit of temerity, however. When minority groups have their religious and cultural identities sidelined by policies geared at preserving laïcité, the result can be paradoxical; a retreat into the very ethnic and religious communities that French politicians so fear. Defenders of the headscarf ban are quick to point to private parochial schools as alternatives for those pupils who are unable to comply for religious reasons. But marginalizing into separate schools the very individuals to whom the Republic ought to reach out the most might not be such a good idea in the long term. As Ali el-Baz, a North African labor leader, was quick to point out in an interview last month, the French-born children of Muslim immigrants don’t want to stay separated from the rest of the population, but their path to l’intégration is blocked by the very policies intended to nudge it along. “I believe in French values and that all citizens are equal,” he said. “But there is a great separation between these ideals and reality.”

On the touchy-at-best subject of identity, French staunchness contrasts sharply with Americans’ cautious sensitivity. But here on the quiet streets of Paris’ suburbs, where Muslims are, in some places, the majority, and where Muslim women wearing headscarves shuffle along their daily routines undisturbed, the France imagined by legislators seems more than just a métro ride away.



Adam Goldenberg '08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. He has spent the summer asserting his own national identity (i.e. “not American”) while coaxing the French into talking to him about theirs.