Laïcité and Regimes of Security: Weaponizing Republican Values against Muslims in France

The French fight against radical violence has recently entered its “anti-separatism” stage. Anti-separatism is somewhat similar to its precursor, the “deradicalization” framework: It focuses on prevention, underscores the importance of laïcité in the (re)education of future republican citizens, and exclusively targets radical Islam. Because of these characteristics, it is commonly understood as an extension of deradicalization policies. This is a misconception. Anti-separatism marks a profound shift in the constitutional model of French secularism and its application to the Muslim community. The 2021 reforms that solidified this change used laïcité to conflate radical violence with fundamentalist religious practice and established a new approach to combating terrorism by restricting religious liberties. The article identifies three successive phases in the state’s framing of jihadist violence: (1) a narrow view of counterterrorism primarily employing military, intelligence, and financial mechanisms; (2) the deradicalization framework asserting that jihadism is rooted in religious communities and should be countered by reinforcing republican values; and the overlooked (3) anti-separatism model that focuses on religious practice and turns against Muslim communal authority shielding individuals from government control. These phases reflect a gradual expansion of “softer” state control over populations achieved by widening the definition of potential suspects from terrorists to sympathizers to, ultimately, religious Muslims. The article argues that the culmination of French policy towards Islam in the anti-separatism approach is linked with the evolution of laïcité into a norm that is incompatible with religious identity, and with the state’s confusion of communautarisme with radical violence.