A “disagreement” over Republican Citizenship? the Aesthetics and Politics of Moslem Opposition to the French Headscarf Law

Between late 2003 and mid 2004, young Moslem women in France engaged in a series of demonstrations against the French government’s recent decision to legislate to ban the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in French state schools. These young women typically articulated their demands in terms not of a call for their religious or ethnic difference to be shown greater tolerance but rather on the basis that any such difference was irrelevant as regards their adherence to universal republican values. These demands were not only articulated linguistically, they were also presented aesthetically, as evident in the tendency of the protestors to wear headscarves in the colours of the French republican flag, thus transforming their Islamic headscarves into version of that icon of French republicanism, the Phrygian bonnet. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, this paper seeks to elucidate the intertwined issues of gender, ethnicity, politics, aesthetics, and universalism at stake in these protests. It argues for the superiority of such an analytical framework in comparison to existing theories of either multicultural tolerance or liberal adjudication between competing conceptions of the good life.