ABSTRACT

Laïcité, France’s idiosyncratic religious neutrality, is a concept that governs significant aspects of daily life while being notoriously variable in its application. Alongside sociological, legal and historical understandings of laïcité, I propose an additional way to view laïcité: through a critical geopolitical perspective. I argue that laïcité has been made and unmade through geographic imaginaries and practices through which idealised modes of universal citizenship confront and negotiate with affiliations to faith and culture to produce hegemonic ideas about the place of religious identity in French society. In particular, this confrontation has occurred within the French public school system, the école républicaine. I argue that laïcité, as it is manifested through educational policies as well as geographic imaginaries, reflects a will to forge a nationally unified citizenry as well as ambivalence about the need to negotiate with locally rooted cultural identities. I illustrate this through the phenomenon of student infringements, or atteintes, against laïcité: while these are framed as a grave threat to republican unity requiring national interventions, there has nevertheless been a consistent lack of spatially specific official knowledge of where atteintes take place.

摘要

“Laïcité”是法国特有的宗教中立性，这一概念支配着日常生活的重要方面，但其应用却变化多端。除了对世俗的社会学、法律和历史理解之外，我还提出了另一种看待世俗的方式：通过批判性的地缘政治视角。我认为，世俗化是通过地理想象和实践而产生和消失的，通过这些想象和实践，理想化的普遍公民模式与信仰和文化的归属进行对抗和谈判，从而产生关于宗教身份在法国社会中地位的霸权观念。特别是，这种对抗发生在法国公立学校系统 école républicaine内部。。我认为，通过教育政策和地理想象所体现的世俗化反映了建立全国统一公民的意愿，以及对与扎根于当地的文化身份进行谈判的必要性的矛盾心理。我通过学生侵犯世俗的现象来说明这一点：虽然这些行为被认为是对共和团结的严重威胁，需要国家干预，但官方始终缺乏关于侵犯发生地点的具体空间知识。