A fragile French republic

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A fragile French republic

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• Terror attacks in France: The French nation was already struggling hard with Covid-19 outbreak, when the terror attacks came. Then again, a fresh lockdown has been imposed due to resurgent Covid-19 cases. The French have become grimly accustomed to Islamic terror attacks against French!
• Samuel Paty's murder: Schoolteacher Samuel Paty was killed by beheading in October 2020, for having showing cartoons of Prophet Muhammad of Islam. The Muslim tradition bars any representations of the Prophet. The 18-year old killer learnt from media that Paty had discussed the cartoons published in "Charlie Hebdo" magazine in 2011 and 2012.
• Why attack Paty: The idea must have been to reignite the culture war against the West, all across the Islamic world, something that had faded during the pandemic. But Paty wasn't doing anything extraordinary. He was, with all sensitivity, orienting his students in proper French tradition of free speech, to think differently. That's what French teachers are trained to do.
• Secularism in schools: Since the start of the Third Republic in 1870, teachers have been the key element in the French mission to unify its diverse population. Rural students were weaned away from the heavy hand of Catholic dogma, and even the indigenous peoples in French colonies weres educated and civilised (a very controversial project, the latter one). In recent years, French teachers have done their best to integrate the divided country.
• The Laicite principle: It is a project of social cohesion and a key part of French citizenship. It is the formal separation of State and Church, and removal of religious values from public space. What comes in their place are secular values like liberty, equality, and fraternity. 
• Laicite in the 2020s: Sadly, laicite now is largely talked about with reference to Islam and Muslims. The decolonisation of French colonies in Africa created many problems related to managing the large Muslim populations there. The violence of the Algerian civil war spilled over into France in 1990s. Then began the stigmatisation of hijab wearing in France, leading to hardened attitudes towards Islam as well as laicite.
• How to respond to terror attacks: A straight way is to compromise and accept that laicite alone cannot resolve the social and political problems. France has practically now become a part of the Muslim world and needs to handle conflicts that many other nations are also facing. Then the French can push "French values" harder, the path President Macron has chosen.
• Risky strategy: Macron's approach is risky, as the reactions of Muslim-majority countries is bound to be hostile. Many of those leaders urgently want something to distract their local populations. But the risk also is that laicite may lose its meaning, from being the force of integrating minorities into national mainstream, to being the exclusionary force that is anti-Muslim in nature. 
• The road ahead: Using laicite as a shield against the amorphous Muslim threay may make it lose its positive elements and become useless as a tool for social integration.

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