At a time when the cards are completely reshuffled, at a time when all scenarios suddenly seem possible, at a time when all political forces are recomposing and rewriting themselves, one might think that the question of secularism has naturally regained its full place in the public debate as a major political marker, which it has always been until now, between the different social projects proposed by the competing parties. However, this is not the case at all! Secularism is, on the contrary, the poor child of this historic legislative campaign. Namely at least.
Because it is nevertheless clear that the issues linked to secularism underlie most of the themes given as dear to the French during the last European elections: whoever speaks of security cannot refrain from thinking of the recent crimes and bloody brawls of adolescents linked to questions of religious orthopraxy (Shaïna, then Samara, Shemseddine, etc.); who rightly denounces the rise of Islamism in France often does so by misusing the principle of secularism, disguised as a bulwark against immigrants, when on the contrary it enjoins us to consider abroad its share of universal reason, of free will and humanity, to view him as a fellow human being and not as the product of an ethnic or religious group; whoever speaks of the recovery of the school cannot fail to think of Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard, assassinated for having embodied the secular school and the freedoms of which it is the promise; which still points to the anti-Semitic peak that our country has experienced since October 7 cannot forget that only secularism strives to break the reflexes and community violence, to prevent thirteen-year-old students from bruising and raping another twelve-year-old because before seeing her as their comrade, their equal, they see her as Jewish.
Today we are paying very dearly for abandoning what held our society together. Identity leaders from the right and the left have understood this very well, and are rushing into the gaps that have appeared all the more easily since no party has really taken the challenge of embodying secularism by making its defense a central combat of its program, advancing it as the condition sine qua non of national harmony and the future of our school.
“Reconciling the French with the Republican promise”
Last week there was this incantatory announcement, without content, without context and without agenda of a “great debate on secularism”, thrown like a dice on the carpet by the President of the Republic with the aim of denouncing – with reason – the cowardice of the left on this issue; but here again, invoking secularism as a simple foil, in a circumstantial manner, without concrete announcements or political ambition, is that serving it or using it?
If the presidential majority really wants to mobilize the universalist republicans, who are an immense electoral pool of political orphans, it is therefore time for it to place secularism at the heart of its social project, and first and foremost, at school! Because it is there that the strongest tensions that are damaging the Republic are crystallized. Because it is there that individual freedom, otherness, citizenship, emancipation through knowledge are learned, and it is for all of this that it is the favorite target of Islamists and sowers of chaos. Because it is only there that one can escape its determinisms and choose one’s destiny, if one has been able to receive a complete education there, free from the taboos that the religious try to impose on it.
Our Prime Minister affirms that, in this election, “the country is playing for itself”: never mind Mr. Attal! We therefore ask you, as well as all present or future political leaders who want to be heirs of the Enlightenment and attached to its transmission, to finally free secularism and its school from the political quarrels which are gnawing at it by making secularism the school a national cause of the Republic. So that the entire nation officially stands behind its teachers in the fight against obscurantism that they wage every day in their classes. So that, leaving the political arena, the question of the adjective that should or should not be applied to secularism is no longer debated, but that, united in the face of the emergency, in the face of the danger in which we find ourselves the republican school – that of muzzling through intimidation, that of terrorist attacks on its teachers – the French form a united front.
Come on, let’s be really ambitious, and let’s even demand a real ministry! An unprecedented state secretariat dedicated to secularism in schools would be finally tangible and strong proof of a commitment to this cause and an awareness of its vital nature for the future of our school, it that is to say of our nation.
Because one thing is certain: whatever party, whatever chapel one belongs to, one cannot fail, without being dishonest, to recognize that only the secular school will make it possible to reconcile the French with the republican promise.