Writing minorities out : The French Constitution’s Republican Turn

It is often believed that there is such a thing as a French brand of republicanism that characterizes the way French institutions frame citizenship, immigrant integration issues or, more recently, secularism. This French idiosyncratic political culture, found in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, is often granted explanatory power when trying to make sense of the political treatment of minority groups: for instance, when the Constitutional Council refused (at least initially) to grant women quotas in political representation, to allow researchers and pollsters to collect ethnic data, or to let women wear full Muslim veils in public space. Although this rationale certainly holds a grain of truth, it is rarely based on a detailed historical analysis of how minorities’ claims were interpreted, and often discarded in French constitutional politics. This paper looks at the historical dynamics between the political sphere and the legal sphere in three recurring constitutional debates which questioned the identity of the constitutional subject in need of protection: gender parity, ethnic statistics and secularism. More precisely, this paper compares how officials in charge of interpreting the Constitution of the Fifth Republic have responded to the claims made by each of these three minorities in these three debates. By adopting such a historical perspective, this paper makes visible how the republican model that some still believe to be inherited from the French revolution is in fact the outcome of a political process, which unfolded at the turn of the 1980s, when the global economic crisis hit France. It also shows the precise interactions between constitutional interpretation and political forces that have shaped a regime of exclusion for minorities -- albeit with different outcomes, since some groups, such as women, have managed to have their claims included in the constitutional design while others, such as Muslims, have been increasingly marginalized since the economic crisis of the late 1970s.