Laicité in the Space of the Nation: French State Secularism As a Technique of Geopolitical Management

France’s long-held principle of state secularism, laïcité, requires the state and citizens to approach each other on grounds of strict religious neutrality. Neither the concept of laïcité nor its manifestations in public policy are new phenomena in French political culture; however, at present a perceived crisis of civic identity, combined with simmering fear and resentment caused by several Islamist terrorist attacks over the past two years, is precipitating a contemporary assemblage of laïcité as a series of statist techniques of geopolitical management within the national education system.

This is especially visible through a recent package of educational reforms, called the Grande Mobilisation pour les Valeurs de la République. This initiative, aimed at reinforcing the French Republic’s values including laïcité, was enacted following the January 2015 attacks in and around Paris, most notably directed at the offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo. Among other things, what the Grande Mobilisation represents is an effort to exercise territorial control over individual schools and neighborhoods by monitoring compliance with the norms of laïcité and providing mechanisms for educators to identify deviance from a core French national value.

This paper lays out a framework that draws on recent work in critical geopolitics in order to show how a state educational initiative is intimately connected to discursive as well as material practices of bordering and defining territory. Such a framework is especially important in the context of the intersection of increasing migration flows to Europe and a currently ascendant populist nationalism across the continent.