Legislating Fraternalism: Representations of Marianne in the 2010 French Face-Veiling Ban

Abstract

While French laïcité is now understood as prohibiting public displays of religiosity (at least ‘conspicuous’ displays) by private citizens, this can be understood as expressing two quite contradictory demands, especially for minority or racialised subjects. On the one hand, the good republican citizen is portrayed as candidly expressive, and the voile intégral in particular is therefore condemned as austère. Yet on the other hand, the republican norm is also one of fraternal modesty, and so the voile intégral is also condemned as rather the opposite—as ostentatious. In this essay, I discuss how these contradictory demands of republican normativity were conveyed pedagogically around the time of the 2010 ban on face veiling, using the ambiguous image of Marianne.