Monday March 3, somewhere after 10 p.m., I found myself listening to theAfter Footthe daily talk show dedicated to football on the RMC radio channel. The conversation was reviewing the subjects that are going through French football at the moment: the financial setbacks of Ligue 1, the climate of aggressiveness against the referees or the question of sport and religious fact. Regarding this last theme, the exchanges focused on the interruptions of matches to allow the break of the fasting of practicing Muslim players, then on the more controversial question, of the veil in women’s football.
Since 2016, the regulation of the French Football Federation (FFF) prohibits “any sign of sign or outfit ostensibly demonstrating a political, philosophical, religious or union” affiliation during the matches. This ban was disputed before the law, in particular by the collective of hijabeuses. However, in May 2023, the Council of State validated the decision of the FFF in these terms: “Sports federations, responsible for ensuring the proper functioning of the public service whose management is entrusted to them, can impose on their players an obligation to neutrality of the outfits during competitions and sports events in order to guarantee the smooth running of the matches and prevent any confrontation or confrontation.”
A subject that torments public debate
From a legal point of view, therefore, the subject has hardly evolved for months. But it continues to frequently torment public debate. Thus, this Monday evening at the beginning of March, in the studio of RMC, a participant argued: “Sorry, but we have the feeling that we are very late for example on what is done in the United Kingdom, where it is not a subject …” A woman specified in echo: “In France, the subject of secularism takes up a lot of space, and we also have an interpretation of secularism that is not the fact that To believe.
I listened to this debate, interested in what was said about this question in a (good) program that is little familiar to me, but I admit I have jumped by understanding that the female voice – that which summarized secularism in “freedom to believe”, and affirmed that we had, in France, a problem of “interpretation” of said secularism – was that of the Minister of Sports, Marie Barsacq. Note that it was before she created the controversy by answering a question similar to the National Assembly.
That we debate on the subject of the veil in sport is completely normal. It is the very exercise of democracy; He doesn’t shock me nor never bother me. Everyone must be able to assert their arguments: the left, the right, the laity, the feminists, the universalists, the multiculturalists, the communitarianists, the religious and even the Islamists (listening to them is often edifying: they are generally very clear about their claims). What distresses me, on the other hand, is the little heart that we put to defend our model, including, obviously, when we are a member of the government. What is sorry is the laziness that falls on the debate when it comes to talking about these questions – including, obviously, when one is a member of the government -, and the spirit of ease that makes him so caricatured and permeable to Soft Powers Coming from abroad, Doha or Hollywood.
There is only one community that is worth
What is it when it comes to talking about the French or spirit of secularism, or republican universalism? Not simply neutrality of public services or the separation of churches and the State. It is a question of a political philosophy which took its roots long before 1905 – Voltaire, the French Revolution, so on and of the Jules Ferry -, and which is based on the fact that in the Republic, there is only a community that is worth: the national community. More than a corpus of laws, it is a way of seeing, a social contract which implies that the vast majority of French people, whatever their origins or their religion, consent – aspire, even – to confine the signs of distinction to the private sphere. So that in everyday life and exchanges, nothing comes to ostently subdivide the national community.
This model, regulated in certain spheres by laws and regulations – such as that of the FFF – is more generally left to the power of cultural heritage and collective aspiration. The bet being that the renunciations to which each consents as to the external manifestation of its faith, its peculiarity or its identity of inheritance, will be compensated by the benefits of a society at the bottom more fraternal than multiculturalist societies, where everyone can do “in their sauce”, but where one mixes less, and where things are ticking faster when the nations are put under the tension of external or interior crises.
If it is necessary to debate it, let’s debate. But let’s do it with the right arguments. And in terms of universalists’ camp: let’s stop apologizing all the time, faced with the lessons of multiculturalists, and in particular American “intersectional”, which, by rejecting effect, were only good at the sails of Trump and Trumpism.
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