Introduction

Abstract

This book analyses French cultural policies in the face of what the French government perceives as a challenge to its Republican secular raison d’être. Islamic ways of life seem to challenge existing conventions relating to freedom of religion and to the distinction between private and public. Between 1877 and 1905, France gressively adopted the principle of laïcité, which prohibits public manifestations of religion. In more recent years, laïcité was invoked for prohibiting the wearing of the hijab at school and the wearing of the niqab and the burqa in the street. This prohibition has proved to be problematic for some segments of the French Muslim minority. Tensions have been growing between the wider French communities and Muslim communities as a result of different codes of dress, contested boundaries of freedom of expression, and a series of terror attacks carried out by Muslim terrorists. Those attacks shocked the French nation and widened negative sentiments of fear, resentment and suspicion regarding Islam and Muslims (PBS NewsHour 2015). In 2015, President François Hollande asked Parliament to extend a state of emergency and to amend the Constitution in order to adequately address terrorism and promote national security. Adam Nossiter and Liz Alderman (2015) reported that “Secular France always had a complicated relationship with its Muslim community, but now it was tipping toward outright distrust, even hostility”.