The Trocadéro

This chapter takes for its focus the high point of the Parisian musical season in 1900: the ten state-sponsored concerts officiels of the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris. As had been the case in 1878 and 1889, the goal of these concerts was to promote specifically Republican ideals through music. Yet in 1900, these ideals had transformed into a secular construction of Frenchness that absorbed Catholicism as a foundational trait of national identity. Although the Church was not represented in any official capacity either on the musical planning commission or on the concert programs themselves, the repertoire performed throughout these concerts created a narrative that centered around a sense of reconciliation between Church State. The carefully crafted vision put forth by the State relied heavily on transformations of the Church for the formation of a cohesive Republican identity such that the Church was present in its displays, theaters, and concerts in a way not seen in any previous Exposition. In the heart of Paris, the Trocadéro hosted a significant amount of explicitly religious music that, when mediated through actors deployed through the state apparatus on an international stage, transformed the Church into an integrated facet of French Republicanism that could be proudly displayed to the Exposition’s international audiences. These concerts functioned not as nostalgic emblems of a Revolutionary past nor as attacks against the political and religious right, but, rather, as a site of transformation at which the Republic co-opted Catholicism as an indispensable aspect of its own French identity.

French Habits No.6

This is a portrait of George Tierney, the Whig politician, one of the staunchest and most determined opponents of Pitt’s government. He had the reputation of being an admirer of French republicanism, which explains his appearance here as proprietor of the guillotine.

Dessalines’s Empire of Liberty

This chapter traces the print culture of the immediate post-independence period leading up to Dessalines’s assassination on October 17, 1806, recasting Haiti’s earliest post-independence writing within the context of political and ideological divisions that shaped the period. Under Dessalineanism, individual rights and liberties had to be sacrificed to the greater cause of sovereign statehood. The republicans disagreed: they sought to found a state according to liberal Enlightenment ideals, embracing the revolutionary language of individual liberties and radical democracy that characterized France’s short-lived First Republic. They wanted to talk about virtue, talents, the rights of man, laws and a constitution, citizens and sharing of power, but were outnumbered and overpowered by the Dessalinean faction—until 1806, when they would revolt against the “tyrannie” of Dessalines’s arbitrary rule and found the Republic of Haiti. It begins by focusing on how Dessalineans consolidated and codified Haitian anticolonial independence through writing, which asserted itself externally as an anticolonial weapon and internally as a force of unity against the enemy within. Next, it considers the republican opposition’s mobilization of the language, ideals, and symbolism of French republicanism to overthrow Dessalines’s empire and their subsequent disavowal of this foundational act of parricide-regicide.

Framing and Claiming “Gender Equality”: A Multi-level Analysis of the French Civic Integration Program

The recent construction of “gender equality” as a defining value of European societies has shaped the policy goals of immigrant integration programs. This focus on “gender equality” may function, paradoxically, to exclude immigrants, if immigrant integration policies rely on stereotypical representations of immigrants and fail to acknowledge the multiple, intersecting forms of inequality that immigrant women face. This article contributes to the critical scholarship on the role of “gender equality” in the field of immigrant integration policy by examining the framing of this concept in the policy documents and implementation of the French civic integration program. Using ethnographic observations and field interviews, I illustrate how frontline workers, many of whom were women of immigrant origin, interacted with participants to frame “gender equality” in exclusionary and inclusionary ways, and how “gender equality” functioned as a racial boundary within the program. The tensions in the discourses of frontline workers mirrored those of the political context in which the policy developed; they were constrained by a difference-blind ideology of French republicanism as they insisted on “gender equality” as the pathway to belonging in France.

L’École républicaine

The longstanding image of the French school as an engine of national unity, egalitarian democracy and republican citizenship is, in the postcolonial era, faltering. Students from working class and/or non-European immigrant backgrounds struggle in a school system that, despite its egalitarian claims, favours students from wealthier families of European descent. The former thus feel excluded from full participation in French society. Such academic inequality casts doubt on the viability of republican universalism, a pillar of French schooling that treats students as autonomous rational actors and resists adjusting the curriculum to cultural particularities. Rooted in the Enlightenment rationalism of the Revolutionary period, this universalist doctrine views the school as a sanctuary where the student develops her or his intellectual faculties in an environment protected from the influence of outside opinion emanating from family, religion, or cultural particularities. Contemporary debates about the integration of France’s multicultural student population thus challenge the very philosophical foundations of French republicanism.

Charlie Hebdo: from controversy to consensus?

Due to the relative recentness of the fatal shootings that took place at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris at the start of 2015, the first chapter of this book will examine debates about the publication’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. This will involve discussing ways in which Islam and Muslims have been depicted in several key editions of Charlie Hebdo over the last decade and a half, and also analysing a court case brought against the publication by French Muslim groups. show that French Republicanism has become a contested terrain when it comes to debates about humour and multiculturalism in France.