Open Access#12021
The Birth of Laïcité: French Secular Governmentality
By positing the idea that French Laïcité (loosely understood as 'state secularism') is not the product of the 1905 law but of the contemporary debate on Islam in France, this paper aims to show that Laïcité has been recently weaponised by both right-wing and left-wing parties to question the belonging of Islam to France. This will be done by relying on the Foucaudian notion of governmentality.