The Ambiguous Reach of Constitutional Secularism in Republican France: Revisiting the Idea of Laicite and Political Liberalism as Alternatives

Abstract

In the scholarship and discourse on French republicanism, it has become something of a received wisdom that the distinct, yet amorphous concept of laïcité in the French history of thought is set apart from the political liberalism of the Anglo-American world. While embracing the separation of religious and civil authority, laïcité is also associated with a highly abstracted and unitary ideal of citizenship, seeking to commit religious, cultural and ethnic differences to the ‘private sphere’, and a formal equality of rights that eschews the deterministic politics of ‘difference’. It is true that the origins of the ideal lie partly in the perfectionist zeal of the late 19th century—when the neologism ‘laïcité’ emerged—during which the anticlericalists of the Third Republic conceived constitutional secularism as a tool with which to emancipate the citizenry from servile, irrational belief-systems. Audard claims that even today, the ‘positivist epistemic’ basis of laïcité renders it unsuitable as a basis for public justification within the ‘political’ strictures of Rawlsian liberalism. I argue that this overlooks the very mixed ideological pedigree of laïcité in the French history of thought—its committal of religious identities to the ‘private sphere’ being compatible with the Rawlsian recognition of ‘reasonable pluralism’. Moreover, this juxtaposition also overlooks certain underexplored, Rawlsian resonances in the French republican history of thought.