CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France — In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, France has begun a defensive but potentially decisive debate over what it means to be French — and whether that definition can make room for its vibrant, growing Muslim population.
At its core, the debate is about whether the French sense of identity has become so intertwined with secularism that the country is failing to honor its ideals as it becomes a multicultural society in which Islam is taking a more prominent place.
By law and tradition, citizens are meant to be judged as individuals without reference to race, religion or gender in the service of the republic’s ideals and its motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. That aspiration, dating to the French Revolution and deeply embedded in French life, was given a powerful voice in the large demonstrations of national unity following the January killings of cartoonists, police officers and Jews by homegrown Islamist radicals.
But these ideals, and the French Republic itself, can feel distant and empty to disaffected Muslims, who traditionally see little distinction between religion and public life. They often view the state’s values as foreign, even blasphemous, imposed on them like a form of cultural colonialism, and sometimes used as a pretext for racial and religious discrimination.
“What is really under challenge here is the notion of France as a totalitarian democracy,” said Andrew Hussey, a Paris-based professor who wrote “The French Intifada: The Long War between France and Its Arabs.” Republicanism here is “a totality, like Communism was, and also sacred,” he said.
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Ms. Cissé, the deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, put the problem simply: “France has trouble changing,” she said.
“Integration, immigration — these are taboo, and at the heart of the program of the National Front and the republican right. Now they must become national issues,” she said. “We have to confront these so-called problems so that one can travel as one wishes, practice our religion when and as we want, just like the others. And have a job, truly, because work is important.”
Otherwise, she said, “France will be engulfed, in the years to come, in these same problems of 2005 and 2015.”
Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura contributed reporting.
