Ostentation and republican civility: Notes from the French face-veiling debates

Secularism and ostentatious religiosity

The anti-face-veiling discourse which emerged in 2009–2011 – following the onset of economic crisis – appealed partly to laïcité as a central pillar of French-republican identity. Historically, laïcité was typically understood in terms of the religious neutrality of public institutions and thus it precluded religious expression only in the institutional sphere of the State. ³ The landmark Church-State separation law of 1905 privatised religions institutionally but legally speaking at least, laïcité had no direct application to private individuals or their manifestation of religious belief in public. Yet in recent decades, laïcité has increasingly been understood as precluding ‘ostentatious’ or indiscrete expressions of religious belief by private individuals acting in public spaces. ⁴

This more expansionary concept developed partly in response to the first ‘headscarf controversies’ which arose in French public schools in the late 1980s. The Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative court, held that schools could not prohibit clothing based solely on its religious character. ⁵ However, gradually the idea of a duty of religious neutrality – traditionally applied to public servants – was extended to embrace the broader concept of a duty of ‘discretion’ for private citizens when manifesting their religious beliefs in public spaces generally. ⁶ Initially this broader concept focused on maintaining the secularity of public institutions, as evidenced in the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious dress in public schools. But in recent years, this broader concept of laïcité has increasingly been invoked to problematise public religiosity generally – for example, minarets, street prayers and of course, ‘full’ religious veiling in public spaces. ⁷ Increasingly this duty of discretion applies not only to those who use public services or institutions, but to those are merely seen in public. This was exemplified in Sarkozy’s appeal to French Muslims, following the Swiss referendum prohibiting Minarets, to ‘refrain from any ostentation or provocation … out of fraternal respect’. ⁸ In this view, laïcité requires religion to be privatised not just legally and institutionally, but socially as well; its constraints extend to individual conduct well beyond the institutional domain. This expansionary view arguably reached its official apogee in the 2010 law prohibiting public face covering. ⁹ Yet official French discourses still oscillate between these contradicting concepts of laïcité. Contradicting the now commonplace understanding, the Conseil d’Etat recently affirmed that, as a legal principle, laïcité ‘cannot be applied directly to society or to individuals’ ¹⁰ – suggesting that duties of religious restraint are in fact confined to public agents.

The expanded reach of laïcité has been justified with reference to distinctive republican ideas. On one view, the extension of religious ‘neutrality’ beyond the institutional sphere represents a perfectionist project intended to promote human flourishing. Indeed its invocation against ‘ostentatious’ public religiosity – against religious practices perceived as servile or oppressive – echoes the emancipatory flavour of late 19th-century anti-clericalist republicanism. ¹¹ A perfectionist laïcité would eschew any strong neutralism, aiming to promote valuable ways of life and thus discourage religious practices associated with servility and oppression ¹² ; it would check the structuring influence of servile religiosities in social life generally and not solely in the institutional space of the State.

Alternatively, public religiosity might be checked not in the interests of human flourishing as such but rather to promote a narrower concept of republican virtue. It might serve the aim of republican stability either in the narrow existential sense of safeguarding republican institutions and forms, or in the broader sense of fostering civic and participatory dispositions in order to give life to republican ideas and institutions. In turn, laïcité might be irreducible to neutrality partly because it aims at promoting ways of life that are compatible with or supportive of republican citizenship. These republican virtues may not necessarily correspond to any perfectionist vision of human flourishing: they might simply comprise of ‘the traits citizens need to talk with one another as equals in the public fora of a contemporary pluralistic society’. ¹³ However, the fact that virtues might be valued instrumentally as skills of citizenship – rather than on perfectionist grounds – does not mean they can, or should be confined to the political domain. Weithman argues that republican virtues must be ‘exercised in activities seemingly unrelated to citizenship’, encompassing ‘affective, intellective, and appetitive dispositions’, ¹⁴ echoing John Adams’ insistence that ‘public virtue cannot exist … without private’. ¹⁵

Relatedly, Spitz notes an inconsistency between classical republican virtues and modern social conditions:

Pocock has claimed that the modern republic is a sort of contradiction in terms since the evolution of [modern] society … away from virtue, active citizenship and patriotism … .The Republic decisively recedes into the past as Western societies become more oriented towards commerce, finance and the production of wealth … so that the political community based on common political deliberation … gives way to a corrupted collective life constituted by egoism and competition. ¹⁶

Of course, laïcité is not a coherent philosophy but rather a historically situated discourse. And insofar as it is increasingly interpreted as imposing an obligation of religious ‘discretion’ and restraining manifestations of public religiosity – in a manner that disproportionately burdens religious minorities in practice – one possible explanation is that it is increasingly understood as a means of protecting the dominant non-political culture from dilution. On this view, the expansive concept of laïcité is in fact a departure from republican universalism, a crude nativism clothing itself in republican verbiage. ¹⁸ Indeed increasingly, it is understood neither as a principle of state neutrality, nor as an instrument of emancipation, but rather as a means of protecting social cohesion – a concept which will of course be understood partly in majoritarian cultural terms. Recent discourse has highlighted the paradox of laïcité – supposedly a distinctive and cohesive doctrine – being cast as a doctrine of state neutrality yet simultaneously as an anti-neutralist project of ‘civic unity’. ¹⁹ While laïcité may be aimed neither at ensuring religious neutrality nor promoting human flourishing, it might serve to safeguard republican stability, shoring up the social frameworks of republican politics and republican citizenship. However, an alternative conclusion – attractive to critical thinkers – is that laïcité’s abstract normative content simply serves to obscure and rationalise majority domination. Indeed, John Bowen argues that laïcité should be understood less in terms of normative theory than as an expression of ‘collective narrative habits’. ²⁰ However, while undoubtedly laïcité has been used to shore up a non-neutralist concept of social cohesion, this offers an incomplete explanation. I argue that insofar as republican laïcité has been understood as precluding ‘ostentatious’ expressions of religious identity in public space, this stems neither from a perfectionist concern for human flourishing – nor, however, can it be reduced to a nativist project of defending the majoritarian non-political identity. Instead, I argue that this understanding of laïcité responds to a particular interpretation of republican sociability – that is a concept of the correct ways of acting and interacting in social space.

Justifications for the face-veiling ban: From republican freedom to republican sociability

The 2010 law prohibiting public face-veiling was preceded by a parliamentary commission hearing chaired by communist deputy André Gerin. The commission’s report represents perhaps the most elaborate official exposition of the normative basis for the prohibition. ²¹

A great deal of the anti-veiling discourse sought to portray the voile intégral as a negation of freedom, and thus used a range of republican idioms about freedom in justifying what it termed as a law of ‘emancipation’. The Gerin report affirmed that face-veiling was not an exercise of ‘liberty of dress’ but rather its negation. It was thought so contrary to human dignity that it could not plausibly be understood as the exercise of authentic choice – and therefore that any ostensible consent to wearing it reflected some background coercion, intimidation or communal pressure. Alternatively, its ostensibly voluntary nature could be attributed to fundamentalist indoctrination of Muslim women. ‘Victims’, the report affirmed, often ‘internalise their oppression and cherish its chains’; ²² therefore, ‘combating the voile intégral’ was a ‘work of liberation’. ²³ And irrespective of individual choice or consent, the burqa nonetheless represented a symbolic offence to equality – a ‘symbol of the inferiority of women’. ²⁴ Similarly, in upholding the law the Constitutional Court affirmed that those veiling themselves ‘voluntarily or otherwise’ were in a position of ‘exclusion or inferiority incompatible with constitutional principles of liberty and equality’. ²⁵

While this discourse used peculiar French-republican idioms, it also appealed to more generalisable republican concerns. The emancipatory tenor of the French discourse echoed a perfectionist concern for human flourishing familiar to some strands of republican thought: Maynor, for example, argues that in cultivating ‘moral autonomy’, ²⁶ republicans must reject liberal neutrality concerning the good life. More saliently, perhaps, it echoed a familiar republican preoccupation with the problem of domination and servitude in social relationships that are clothed by formal consent (indeed the French government’s Guide Républicain includes La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude). ²⁷ Thus, the anti-veiling discourse oscillated between a perfectionist autonomy-based doctrine, focused on emancipating women themselves from servile dispositions, and a negative concept of republican freedom understood as non-domination, focused on the cultural and social control of women’s choices. ²⁸ Thus, the Gerin report referred to the problems of intimidation and coercion, but also the social and cultural ‘conditioning of free will’. ²⁹ (Indeed a similar tension was evident in the earlier debate concerning the ban on conspicuous religious dress in the public schools). ³⁰

While these liberty and equality-based justifications have been extensively documented and critiqued, I will discuss a rather different strand of justification for the face-veiling prohibition. Specifically, I focus on the commonplace interpretation of face-veiling as exemplifying a broader phenomenon of ‘incivility’, understood as widespread defiance of republican norms of social interaction. These incivilities are seen as reflecting the failure of a peculiar form of republican virtue – one not directly connected to political activity, but rather one which corresponds, roughly speaking, to the modes of social interaction – and indeed, of mundane conduct – thought appropriate for republican citizens.

Accordingly the Gerin commission depicted the ‘full veil’ both as a negation of individual freedom, thus portraying wearers as oppressed victims – but also as defying republican norms of sociability – and thus depicting wearers as aggressors. In her testimony to the commission, the feminist intellectual Elisabeth Badinter invoked republicanism’s ‘duty of fraternity’ – a duty, she argued, that was incompatible with the practice of hiding one’s face in public. ³¹ Under the ‘fraternity’ heading the report described face-veiling as a ‘form of incivility’. ³² To some extent, republican civility was understood as requiring citizens to fraternally interact and publicly express themselves – and not just in the narrow domain of politics. The ‘fraternal’ citizen is understood as one prepared to interact and communicate, and at the very least to be seen in public space. In this light, the refusal to reveal one’s face to others is then seen as almost a parody of anti-republican incivility – or in the terms of the Gerin report, an alienating ‘repli sur soi’ (a ‘withdrawal into oneself’). This echoes a broadly communitarian concern ‘that a society whose only public commitments are to neutrality, individuality or autonomy would be inherently fragile’, ³³ and that accordingly, ‘republics should foster not the minimal virtues of civility and toleration, but the more demanding virtues of mutual empathy’. ³⁴ It is probably no coincidence that the expansionary conception of laïcité as embracing norms of social interaction gained traction at a time of disillusionment with the failed economic experiment of the Mitterrand era – as ‘republican writings … abounded on … the development of social anomies and “incivilities”’. ³⁵ Thus, the demands of republican solidarity are extended beyond the ‘public’ sphere, in its narrow constitutional sense, precisely because ‘abstract citizenship must be complemented with allegiance to a republican public culture’. ³⁶ And as Laborde notes, fraternalist republicans will aim to promote favoured dispositions beyond the political domain ³⁷ ; thus, the duty of civility reflects a conception of the State as a ‘public socialising agent’ ³⁸ across multiple public and quasi-public sites.

In some iterations, these duties of civility were understood in terms of openness and expressivity, thus requiring citizens to willingly reveal their faces in public. The report affirmed that ‘refusing to engage others with an uncovered face is … a sign of defiance’. ³⁹ One expert witness discussed the requirement of maintaining a ‘candid identity’ in republican society. ⁴⁰ Another described the burqa as a ‘radical rupture with reciprocity and exchange’ – ‘essential values since the classical period’. ⁴¹ ‘Mores’, it was affirmed, ‘must be shaped so as to enable civil exchange’. ⁴² Similarly, the official explanatory memorandum for the 2010 law suggested that face-covering contravened the ‘ideal of fraternity’, referring specifically to its ‘reclusive’ nature and asserting that it ‘fails to satisfy the minimum civility necessary in social relations’. ⁴³

Accordingly, religious face-veiling was seen as rejecting the fraternal sociability required of republican citizens – the willingness to reveal one’s face being seen as a basic condition of citizenship. In this understanding, fraternal sociability is juxtaposed with servile religious piety; indeed Bowen notes that in France, even the more limited head-veiling is often associated ‘with an older, more demanding form of Catholicism’, evoking ‘a woman’s decision to join a religious order and cover herself as a sign of her submission and modesty’. ⁴⁴ The imperative of fraternal interaction is understood partly in relation to the skills and dispositions of participative citizenship. And indeed, a religious face-veiler might object that they remain capable of discharging various communicative civic duties, including protest, debate, voting, etc. However, the fraternalist rationale is not limited to the functional barrier that face-veiling allegedly presents; rather, the republican state claims to promote fraternal dispositions in social life generally rather than the political domain, narrowly understood.

Republican freedom, understood as non-domination, is often explained metaphorically in terms of citizens’ capacity to ‘look others in the eye’, when they are secured against intimidation or reprisal by more powerful agents. ⁴⁵ Indeed republican freedom is often described as ‘status freedom’. Yet while in this understanding, citizens must have the capacity to look each other in the eye, they are not obliged to do so, as the State does not coerce self-mastery or aim to cure dispositions of timidity and unsociability. But in the French debate, being able to publicly reveal one’s face is understood not only as a metaphor for republican freedom, but more pertinently as a republican duty.

Face-veiling and flamboyance

I have outlined how, to a certain extent, the veiling debate framed republican duty in terms of fraternal expressivity – and how correspondingly it depicted the voile intégral as being excessively modest and austere, as a sign of submission and servility. Ostensibly then, republican civility is juxtaposed with austere religious piety. However, my aim is to explore an alternative concept of republican sociability or civility that was revealed in the anti-veiling debates. In this alternative interpretation, the dominant narrative portrayed the voile intégral not as being excessively modest and austere, but rather as the opposite – as inappropriately ostentatious, or even flamboyant. Correspondingly, republican duty was constructed not in terms of expressive sociability, but rather, modesty, forbearance and self-restraint. Far from religious austerity defying republican expressivity, religious expressivity violated republican austerity.

The Gerin report – echoing the broader public discourse – certainly depicted the burqa as a pre-modern practice and as the expression of an austere religious fundamentalism. Paradoxically, however, it was also depicted as the expression of a modern and ‘hyper-individualist’ form of religiosity that trumped basic standards of civility. ⁴⁶ It was described as individualistic partly in the sense that it represented a source of distinction in the liberal social field. Thus, religious face covering was described as an ‘attack on our social code’ because its ‘individualist dimension tends towards the radical affirmation of personality in the search for an identity in social space’. ⁴⁷ This argumentation sought to portray burqa wearers as attention-seeking narcissists who seek ‘self-affirmation’ ⁴⁸ through defiance of social conventions. Similarly, during the earlier debates on the hijab preceding the 2004 ban on religious garb in public schools, fraternalist republicans had interpreted ostentatious religiosity ‘as symptomatic of the advent of a “rights based” and “me-first” society’. ⁴⁹ An anthropologist testifying to the Gerin commission described the burqa as a form of narcissistic, anti-social attention-seeking: it reflected an ‘adolescent’ conception of religion, ‘a desire to set oneself apart from conventional practice’. ⁵⁰ In more academic fora it has also been described as expressing a desire for ‘originality’ and authenticity, ⁵¹ and as ‘a strategy of social distinction’ ⁵² – one which, Amghar argues, is partly a mechanism for negotiating or compensating social exclusion. ⁵³ In fact Liogier argues that the distinguishing feature of the ‘voile intégral’ in the Western European context is its ‘ostentatious’ nature – the fact that it expresses a desire for visibility or distinction in public space. It is precisely this feature which makes it ‘hypermodern’. ⁵⁴ (Joan Wallach Scott argues that the French discourse framed religious ostentation as ‘sexual provocation’). ⁵⁵

Thus, religious ostentation was deemed uncivil not because the wearer distances or separates themselves from their community – in the manner of austere communities like the Amish – but rather because they seek to differentiate or distinguish themselves within it. Indeed, Bowen notes that the earlier polemic concerning Muslim head-coverings in public schools centred partly on the (alleged) problem of ‘Muslims show[ing] themselves in public as distinct from other people’. ⁵⁶ To illustrate this he quotes a French acquaintance complaining that hijab wearers ‘were throwing their difference right at me’. ⁵⁷ While Elisabeth Badinter, again, argued that the ‘full’ veil rejects values of reciprocity and sociable exchange, she also noted it ‘makes an exhibition of the wearer, with everyone staring at this exotic object … [who] thus becomes an object of fantasy’. ⁵⁸ Radical veiling is then seen in the same light as alienating, aggressive youth sub-culture, comparable to ‘gothism’. ⁵⁹ Thus, it is viewed as self-indulgent affectation – as pretentious and posturing – from the standpoint of conventional mores, and stemming from the ‘perverse pleasures’ – in the report’s terms – of ‘exhibitionism and voyeurism’. ⁶⁰

This perception of ostentatious religiosity as a source of individual distinction is echoed in Bowen’s anthropology of the earlier hijab debates: the dominant assumption being that head-covering illustrate ‘the wearer’s greater piety and purity than those around her’. ⁶¹ More generally it evokes the Bourdieusian conception of social practice as being oriented towards distinction in discrete social fields – and of religious practice specifically as a competitive social ‘field’ structuring the distribution of religious symbolic power. ⁶² Correspondingly, the increasingly individuated and differentiated avenues of individual distinction – via ‘ostentatious’ self-expression – are seen as reflecting a decline in the sort of social cohesion that undergirds republican politics. In part, face-veiling was seen as a caricatured version of broader patterns of narcissistic self-expression in an increasingly atomised, differentiated society. In turn, the peculiar French-republican habitus can be understood partly in relation to social conformity – an expectation that the idealised republican citizen will not seek distinction by excessively differentiating himself or herself from the social mainstream. Indeed, a few years before the eruption of the face-veiling controversy, Sarkozy, then Interior Minister, insisted: ‘freedom is the rule in the private sphere; republican conformity is the rule in the public sphere’. ⁶³ This concept of republican modesty is reflected in Bowen’s observation: ‘social mixing effaces particularistic identities and gives individuals a republican sameness, a social anonymity in the public sphere’. ⁶⁴ This in turn helps to explain why face covering was not only problematised as a functional barrier to political participation.

There is of course a deep irony in the depiction of the ostentatious burqa as contrary to republican austerity, as it is frequently understood as itself being a quintessentially austere form of dress, reflecting pious asceticism (and frequently being connected to Saudi-inspired Salafism in the French context). The Gerin report discussed whether the ‘full’ veil could be considered a plausible interpretation of Islamic law. Yet the claim by its wearers to individually interpret religious obligation further illustrates its role as an instrument of individuation and self-expression. And paradoxically, while the commission doubted the voluntary nature of face-veiling, its understanding of the practice as form of individualistic self-expression attributes a rather aggressive, unsettling form of agency to veil wearers. Paradoxically, then, niqab wearers were depicted as victims lacking agency, but also as being engaged in a hyper-individualistic struggle for distinction.

The concept of republican civility invoked in the face-veiling debates – one connected to modesty and self-restraint – shores up the expansionary understanding of laïcité as a check on ostentatious religiosity in social life generally. On the one hand, this concept of secular restraint in everyday interaction illustrates how laïcité operates as a function of affect and even ‘aesthetics’ ⁶⁵ rather than abstract normative theory. And certainly, this understanding inflicts a disproportionate burden on religious and ethnic minorities in practice. On the other hand, however, this idea of a duty of modesty – understood as the duty not to ostentatiously express particularist identities – dovetails with the abstracted concept of citizenship that generally prevails in French-republican thought. Ostensibly, republican ‘universalism’ suggests that citizenship transcends and therefore co-exists with diverse non-political identities. ⁶⁶ However, the veiling debates saw this turned on its head, with ‘universalist’ citizenship requiring a degree of conformity or convergence in social practice. As one presidential advisor put it, ‘we have to place ourselves in the public sphere by abstracting from our individual characteristics’. ⁶⁷ Thus since republican citizenship is supposed to transcend any ‘particularist’ or non-political identity, by extension it is argued that for citizens to manifest or display allegiance to such identities represents a failure of civic virtue, as it amounts to a symbolic defiance of their identity as citizens. The ostentatious affirmation of particularist identities extricates the subject from the civic bond. In short, then, republican abstraction assumes embodied forms.

Indeed some historical antecedents support the view that republican aversion to ostentatious religiosity cannot be understood solely as a reaction against Islamic practices. For example, the Constitution of the Year III (1795), while permitting private associations, prohibited the wearing of signs of affiliation to these. Similarly, a failed amendment to the law of church-state separation of 1905 proposed to prohibit the wearing of priests’ vestments in public. The arguments raised in favour of the amendment have remarkable resonance with the contemporary debate on female veiling. In the debate on the amendment in the Chamber of Deputies, it was claimed not only that the vestments represented a sign of ‘submission’ – and indeed of fundamentalism, posing ‘an impassable barrier with secular society’ – but also one of provocation. ⁶⁸ And in the late 19th century, Catholic processions had been the subject of local prohibitions as they came to be perceived as provocative in an increasingly anti-clerical climate. From the 1830s, ‘republicans interrupted processions … to force them back into churches and out of public spaces’; ⁶⁹ and an earlier draft of the 1905 law proposed to prohibit them. ⁷⁰ The processions were interpreted as pro-monarchical, ‘hostile to the [republican] regime and its institutions’ ⁷¹ – but their ostentatious character equally represented a symbolic rejection of republican citizenship; they had assumed a ‘triumphal and spectacular character’. ⁷²

Ultimately this understanding of republican virtue as requiring modesty in self-expression seems to undermine the claimed universalism of the French-republican project. This universalism centres primarily on the idea that citizenship can be defined independently of non-political solidarities or commonalities amongst citizens, ⁷³ and it is often juxtaposed with the ‘differentialist’ or ‘communalist’ (communautariste) principles presumed to prevail in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries. ⁷⁴ Correspondingly, republican virtues are said to be culturally neutralist in principle, because they aim not at preserving an organic ethnos or culturally specific way of life, but rather a political community founded on abstract universal principles. However, Laborde notes that while fraternalist republicanism eschews any conception of organic, pre-political solidarities, in practice it will require a degree of ‘cultural convergence’. ⁷⁵ Arguably this stems from the fact that fraternal solidarities can only be expressed through culturally specific conventions and symbols. Where republican fraternity (or civility) is taken as precluding ‘ostentatious’ or flamboyant practices, these standards will be interpreted in culturally specific ways. Indeed it is impossible to envisage how ostentation or flamboyance could be interpreted based on a pre-cultural or culturally neutral yardstick. Therefore, in practice, republican duties of conformity and modesty will likely be interpreted in a manner that disproportionately burdens minority cultural practices. In turn, secularist appeals for religious ‘discretion’ demarcate public and private boundaries along implicitly ethno-cultural lines, notwithstanding the neutralist republican verbiage in which these duties may be presented. And ultimately this may undermine the republican claim to dissociate citizenship from non-political solidarities. While it has long been observed that facially neutral legislative provisions clothe majoritarian cultural norms, this highlights a somewhat less obvious sense in which republican ‘universalism’ can be understood as insidiously non-neutralist.

Austerity and ostentation in republican thought

The pervasive rhetorical use of ‘civility’ and ‘fraternity’ in France’s anti-veiling discourse is partly an expression of the idiomatic specificities of its political culture. However, it also has resonance with the broader republican history of thought. Some strands of republican thought explicitly juxtaposed ostentatious self-expression with austere republican virtue. Perhaps more than any other republican thinker, Rousseau identified flamboyance and ostentation as symptomatic of corruption. ⁷⁶ His constitutional ideas were aimed largely at fostering austerity as a sort of social framework for republican government – conceiving it as an antidote to corruption in social life as well as politics in the narrower sense. ⁷⁷ Rousseau famously argued that servitude and dependency could be avoided only by men submitting themselves to the impersonal rule of the ‘general will’. However, he assumed the general will could only be realised in cohesive and undifferentiated societies, bereft of encoded complexities. Conversely, he viewed ostentation and luxury as insidious sources of corruption in increasingly differentiated early modern societies devoted to commerce and private interest. Like other republicans, Rousseau observed the tendency of tyrannical governments to deploy ostentatious and flamboyant symbols. ⁷⁸ However, he was equally concerned that in complex liberal societies, domination and inequality would assume insidious symbolic forms, embedded in the ostensibly mundane and everyday – in taste, rituals and manners. ⁷⁹ He viewed simplicity of manners as integral to republican virtue, and complex, sophisticated manners as symptomatic of a desire for distinction that is connected in turn to corruption and domination. Pocock has argued that in 18th century thought, virtue was increasingly understood in precisely the opposite terms – that it was connected to the refinement of manners in commercial society. Thus, commerce was defended from republican criticism specifically on the grounds that virtue – unlike the ancients’ version – was to be exercised not in the domain of political action but rather through ‘relationships and interactions with other social beings’ – with the commercially oriented subject ‘developing more and more aspects of his personality’ in ‘an increasingly transactional universe of commerce and the arts’. ⁸⁰ Thus, ‘the social psychology of the age declared that encounters with things and persons evoked passions and refined them into manners’; this ‘more than compensated for [the] loss of antique virtue’. ⁸¹

Yet as an archaising republican, Rousseau effectively rejected this view in identifying complex manners as a site of insidious domination. And more specifically, he interpreted cultural consumption and self-expression as expressions of a corrupted amour-propre. He feared that in complex societies, amour-propre would manifest itself as ‘frenzy for distinction’, ⁸² clothed in ostensibly innocuous forms. Thus, he presciently interpreted taste and culture as positional goods, as sources of rank and distinction. For Rousseau, cultural consumption and self-expression are never disinterested: they allow urbane individuals to pursue highly encoded forms of distinction – ‘pretentious pleasures’ ⁸³ – in order to ‘please and win recognition from others’. ⁸⁴ This was given obvious expression in his famous ambivalence towards the theatre, but he was suspicious of pretence and theatricality in social life more generally: he lamented that in liberal society, ritualism become privatised, differentiated and specialised. ⁸⁵ Therefore, he depicted ostensibly benign forms of cultural practice – such as art and theatre – as the antithesis of republican fraternity and solidarity.

And amour-propre, in turn, is partly embodied. Ellison notes that in relation to dress, specifically, Rousseau complains: ‘the language of the body [is] … in public life … always costumed’. ⁸⁶ Ostentatious or flamboyant dress – much like other forms of self-expression – simply reflects a corrupted desire for individual distinction which is typical of the cosmopolitan city. Thus in his constitutional project for Poland, he instructs the Poles to celebrate and foster traditional dress as an antidote to affected cosmopolitan habits: ‘let neither the king nor the senators nor any public figure wear anything but the national costume’. ⁸⁷ More generally he exhorts them to ‘revive simple customs and wholesome tastes’. ⁸⁸ Through such prescriptions, republican austerity will cure citizens of ‘the frivolous tastes created by opulence’. ⁸⁹

In this light, the Rousseauan republican will have a relatively apprehensive attitude concerning the constitution and function of private identity in liberal society. Cultural and religious practices might be seen less as the expression of ‘comprehensive doctrines’ which locate the individual in a scheme of ‘ends’, and more as a process of self-location within complex symbolic economies. While Rousseau envisaged republican austerity as an antidote to a corrupted social and cultural politics, correspondingly his insight was to question whether republicanism could feasibly limit itself to promoting narrowly ‘public’ or political virtues: austerity, he thought, needed to be practised beyond the political realm. Conversely, the conundrum he raises is how virtue can be constitutionally promoted to a sufficient extent without negating individual independence and self-worth. His solutions included not only economic autarky, but also a relentless and pervasive public ritualism, encompassing various ceremonies, symbols, oaths and festivals. He envisaged these not only as fostering civic virtue and participative dispositions, but also as substituting and supplanting corrupted private rituals. ⁹⁰ He emphasises the simplicity and transparency of republican spectacles – ‘noble and imposing’ ⁹¹ : athletic festivities, for example, will ‘divert people from dangerous idleness, effeminate pleasures, and frivolous wit’. ⁹²

This ritualism is perhaps not as severe and didactic as it first seems: republican ritualis, Rousseau suggests, might consist simply of gatherings around ‘a crown of flowers in the square’ ⁹³ – a spontaneous ‘Bacchanalia of the political’, ⁹⁴ fostering ‘gentle bonds of pleasure and joy’. ⁹⁵ He rejects individuated and complex ritualisms – those exclusive spectacles which ‘enclose the few in dark lairs’. ⁹⁶ Thus, complexity in cultural and social practice must be resisted because of the alienating barriers it imposes; ‘innocent spectacles’ must take place ‘in the open air … illuminated by the sun’; ⁹⁷ in republican rituals, the many societies become one. ⁹⁸ The republican festival, then, is transparent because it is ‘without invidiousness’ ⁹⁹ – an intoxicating sense of togetherness obviates the need for specialised forms of self-expression. And that is perhaps the true sense of Rousseau’s apparently alarming assertion that ‘the only true joy is public’. ¹⁰⁰

But fundamentally, transparency in republican social life means that citizens must first be seen, so that their amour-propre – their need for recognition and approbation – can be consummated in the transparent public realm. We insert ourselves in the political world not by deliberating with, but most fundamentally by appearing to others, shorn of encoded artifice. Republican festivals, Rousseau says, will teach citizens ‘to live in the eyes of their fellow citizens and to desire public approbation’. ¹⁰¹

In Montesquieu’s interpretation, the ancients’ republican virtue was unrealistic because of the burdens of self-sacrifice it required; however, Viroli argues that in the Italian-renaissance strand, virtue did not require the sacrifice of individual pleasures or interests, but rather the privileging of certain pleasures over others. ¹⁰² Rousseau’s constitutional schema can be interpreted in this light – as a complex system of incentives, aimed not at inculcating austere sacrifice but rather at channelling passions (and amour-propre) towards forms consistent with republican aims. Thus, crucially, he does not present republican civility as a duty as such. Rather, while he recognises that amour-propre leads individuals to desire distinction, he believes that this desire can be channelled – by political and social structure – towards transparent, public forms. Thus, ostentation and flamboyance are understood as defying the politics of republican transparency because they see amour-propre consummated in privatised, inaccessible sources.

An obvious Rousseaun quandary is whether republican austerity may justify coercive suppression of corrupted ostentation or immodesty. Perhaps this simply echoes the familiar republican conundrum of whether and how the promotion of virtue may limit private freedoms. ¹⁰³ In Constitutional Project for Corsica, Rousseau recommends sumptuary laws prohibiting luxury goods, but suggests they will play a relatively minimal role in promoting virtue. ¹⁰⁴ Instead he envisages that republican virtues will be fostered indirectly by structural and constitutional factors, and particularly an autarkical political economy. In a republican autarky, vices will be ‘tempered by labour’ ¹⁰⁵ rather than by coercive law. Similarly in Government of Poland, he argues that ‘simplicity of manners … is the fruit not so much of law as of education’. ¹⁰⁶ This vaguely tracks a wider debate concerning coercion and perfectionism. ¹⁰⁷ On the one hand, it might be argued that republican virtues should be promoted by constitutional processes and social structures – and through public education – rather than coercive prohibitions. However, with the French debate in mind, might legislative prohibitions nonetheless play a supplementary role in expressing communal disapproval of practices seen as negating republican virtue? Legislation might operate as a supplement in the systems of community discipline that spring from republican structures and forms. Of course, in any event it is difficult to see how the classical republican virtues – historically envisaged within intimate, ‘face to face’ societies – could be replicated in complex, mass liberal societies. ¹⁰⁸

The republican framing of lifestyle politics – the focus on speech, dress, dignity and decorum – might be seen as an arcane Rousseauan quirk. But in other strands of the tradition, republican virtue equally assumes embodied and symbolic forms. Viroli, for example, notes that in the Italian tradition, the dominant motivation for virtuous engagement stems not only from ‘a moral sense … a contempt for corruption and arrogance’, but also ‘from an aesthetic sense of decency and dignity’. ¹⁰⁹ French republicans’ aversion to the flamboyance of face-veiling evokes republicanism’s historical association with stereotypical masculine virtues and with a gendered sense of dignity. Régis Debray, a prominent French intellectual and public figure, argued: ‘if homo republicanus has the “faults of the masculine”, then homo democraticus has the “qualities of the feminine”’. ¹¹⁰ And historically, republicanism defined ‘virtue’ in a gendered lens – juxtaposing feminine purity and private forbearance with ‘male public spirit’. ¹¹¹

Beyond Rousseau, republicans may demand a level of civility in social practices that liberals generally eschew. Republican civility – because it is taken as requiring interactive, even fraternal sociability – is sometimes juxtaposed with liberal toleration. ¹¹² Indeed in some interpretations, tolerant liberal civility historically substituted the ancients’ more bracing, full-blown sense of citizenship. It then falls outside and below the domain of the political, ‘a private’ virtue, a ‘bond uniting honest men busy minding their own affairs’. ¹¹³ For the celebrated puritan dissenter Roger Williams, ‘civility constituted rather a very low bar of respectful behavior towards others entirely compatible with a lack of respect, disapproval, and even disgust for them and their beliefs’. ¹¹⁴ Thus, republicanism rejects liberal toleration because the very condition of liberal toleration is mutual disapproval. For liberals, seeking to eliminate this condition would itself be coercive and intolerant: republicans, however, will tend to believe we cannot hope to merely put up with one other begrudgingly.

From a liberal perspective, these republican impulses risk engendering various forms of communitarian excess – those ‘several unalluring features’ of Jacobinism and unbridled popular sovereignty – which Spitz (sardonically) notes are so often attributed to French-republican thought. ¹¹⁵ More specifically Laborde notes how French republicanism has regarded toleration as too minimal a virtue, aiming instead for ‘the more demanding virtues’ to provide the requisite ‘motivational anchorage’. ¹¹⁶ Indeed, the elusive ‘vouloir vivre ensemble’ – literally, the ‘will to live together’ – has become something of a leitmotif in contemporary French-republican discourse. It refers abstractly to the voluntarist basis of the social contract, but also, more concretely, to the mundane fraternalist dispositions thought of as being symptomatic of a healthy republican society. In the face-veiling debate, this was manifested specifically in the demand of visual availability, in the willingness to reveal one’s face to others. But as I have argued, the defiance of this norm could be framed by ‘republicans’ as being at once excessively modest yet also as violently, unsettlingly expressive.

An obvious concern is that the republican demands of virtuous civility will impose inordinate burdens on individual independence and self-worth. Goodin argues not only that republicanism fails to offer a coherent alternative to liberal ideas, but also that historically, standard republican policies aimed at fostering virtue have engendered oppressive social conformity. Since the republic is a ‘status’ society, driven by ‘dignity and embarrassment’ it requires members to internalise notions of ‘honor and shame’. He argues that republican morality is not austere, but rather pious, focused on outward performances of propriety; it is ‘precious’, requiring citizens to internalise ‘concerns with one’s image’ rather than morality as such. ¹¹⁷ Republican mores prompt pageantesque displays of honour and dignity – ‘empty exhortations to virtue’. ¹¹⁸

Mastering idioms, performing civilities

Ostensibly, France’s departure from a neutralist concept of republican secularism – and its commitment to fostering fraternal dispositions beyond the political domain – stems from a concern for political stability. From this perspective, a strong neutralism will allow anti-republican doctrines to go unchecked, thus undermining the social framework of republican politics and republican freedom. This reflects a commonplace perception that compared to liberalism, republicanism demands a deeper projection of its political values within ‘private spheres’. ¹¹⁹ But my broader argument is that radical religious practices are seen as destabilising not necessarily because they are interpreted as communicating anti-republican doctrines – and certainly not because they pose an existential threat to republican institutions. Rather, they are seen as symptomatic of wider anti-republican dispositions, manners and habits, rather than of doctrines and beliefs as such. And so republican stability, in this lens, has strongly affective, symbolic and embodied dimensions. Essentially, face-veiling is problematised because it defies a republican habitus – and in turn, this is irreducible to any set of normative propositions about republican institutions or republican justice. By the republican habitus, I mean a concept or sense of how republican citizens orient themselves, and ought to orient themselves in the social world – using a set of bodily and linguistic techniques which serve as strategies for interaction and self-presentation. And what is of interest, then, is that while the requirements of the habitus – such as duties of civility or fraternity – are irreducible to normative republican theory, they are supported, explained and enforced in those terms.

Most political philosophers have understood the virtue of civility in connection with the idea of public reason; for Rawls, it is linked to the duty of the ‘reasonable’ citizen in presenting arguments that are accessible to others. ¹²⁰ In short, ‘the civil citizen exercises tolerance in the face of deep disagreement about the good’; ¹²¹ thus, civility in this sense is understood in terms of political speech constraints. Of course, the real-world discourse of civility exemplified in the French debate had no immediate relation to political speech as such, but rather the more mundane aspects of social interaction. However, some normative theorists have argued that as a political virtue civility may extend beyond the domain of political speech. ‘Polite’ as distinct from ‘political’ civility – or simply ‘good manners’ in the broader sense of courtesy or etiquette – may be understood as a means of extending respect as an ethical virtue generally – and by extension, it can be understood as expressing friendship, solidarity or fraternity as political virtues. Civility in this wider sense will extend beyond political speech – or even speech per se – to include gestures and rituals. Crucially, this blurs the distinction between the ‘political’ civility thought relevant to the sphere of justice, and the ‘polite’ civility usually thought of as outside it. ¹²² These same theorists typically concede that the content of codes of civility or good manners – that is the specific rituals and gestures they require – is culturally and morally arbitrary. Being civil simply requires ‘conforming to whatever the rules are’; moreover it requires the appearance of respect, through the performance of such codes, rather than actual respect. ¹²³ Nonetheless, they insist that this performative civility still has an important moral function, precisely because – as Buss puts it – ‘appearing to respect people is essential to really respecting them’. ¹²⁴ Despite manners having a certain situational arbitrariness, respect can only be communicated in a given symbolic framework, through ‘codified social rules’. ¹²⁵

This idea – that arbitrarily defined ‘good manners’ may be a component of ethical virtue – may well carry some weight as a claim of moral philosophy. It is true that in imperfect worlds, moral respect can only be communicated in the framework of existing conventions, symbols and manners. But what this implies, effectively, is that a meaningful moral life requires us both to perform and first to learn manner-based codes of civility. Thus, I am less concerned with civility as an abstract moral virtue and more with the subtle exclusions and indeed, violence that it imposes in its instantiated, particularised forms. In particular I am concerned with the exclusions and burdens that are imposed simply by virtue of the learning processes which these codes require. What the French example helps to demonstrate is the location of this learning process within a broader linguistic and symbolic economy in which the republican habitus – and its norms of civility – is constituted and reproduced. Political theory, I suggest, should consider codes of civility primarily in terms of what they require of citizens in these concrete terms. I suggest this can be addressed at two distinct levels.

First, the republican habitus consists partly of bodily dispositions, orientations and techniques through which the republican citizen positions and presents herself in the social world. These techniques must be learned – and since the learning process is differentiated based on various social factors, this in itself imposes exclusionary burdens. The bodily and linguistic techniques that constitute republican civility are highly encoded partly because they embrace a situational or cultural specificity which will appear arbitrary and perhaps incomprehensible to those not already endowed with it. This is supported by Bourdieu’s analysis of the ‘field’ and the various modes of acquisition for positional capital. ¹²⁶ Whether republican civility requires expressivity or austere restraint, its performance requires certain bodily techniques which in turn, represent a form of social capital, experienced as the ‘feel of the game’. Indeed Bourdieu’s insight is that power relations are embedded ‘in the most automatic gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body’; ¹²⁷ thus recognition and social power are located in morally arbitrary forms of know-how. And while this republican habitus intersects with gendered norms, the social capital which enables its performance is differentially distributed and acquired along cultural and class lines. Therefore, whatever its abstract merits, civility (or indeed ‘fraternity’) imposes unequal burdens precisely because it assumes (partly) embodied forms.

Second, the discourse as well as the practice of civility is highly esoteric and encoded. While the bodily (and linguistic) techniques that constitute the republican habitus are highly encoded and unequally accessible, the same goes for the normative terminologies through which they are promoted and enforced in public discourse. It is axiomatic that political speech is itself idiomatic, and therefore, encoded. Correspondingly, participatory competence in political speech requires subjects to master particularised, somewhat arbitrary idioms. It is often noted that French-republican concepts are articulated in a highly idiomatic and nationally specific manner. Political discourse tends to operate through a set of republican idioms about public affairs (vivre-ensemble, repli identitaire, etc.) ¹²⁸ – essentially an esoteric republican jargon, or what Laborde more generously calls ‘pervasive linguistic conventions’. ¹²⁹ As Bowen puts it, ‘everyone [in France] translates their particular concerns into republican phrases’. ¹³⁰ Laborde argues that apparently ‘untranslatable’ concepts or idioms, often misunderstood or dismissed by critical and analytical philosophers alike, may in fact speak to more ‘general categories’ beyond a culturally specific discourse. ¹³¹ I also assume, however, that the idiomatic specificity of republican discourse fulfils a distinctive political purpose in its own right. Participation in self-consciously republican discourses requires the learning of republican terminologies or idioms. While the idiomatic and encoded character of French-republican concepts is perhaps unusually pronounced, this is simply a reflection of a broader character of political discourse: that it is conducted using more or less arbitrary techniques based on which participatory competence is appraised and assigned. Drawing on Bourdieu again, we can surmise that political idioms serve as distinctive function in invisibly and insidiously reproducing classifications of merit and belonging as they represent a highly encoded form of currency or capital necessary to participate in the ‘field’ of political discourse. For Bourdieu, agents are dominated where they lack ‘the linguistic competences valorized in a particular social or institutional domain’. ¹³² And these competences are not limited to the mastery of idiom; indeed they are located partly in the ‘embodied character of speech’. ¹³³ Participatory competence is based partly on an ‘articulatory style’ that encompasses accent, bodily technique, etc. But the salient point is that while participation in political discourse is fundamentally a matter of social rather than cognitive competence, the components of this competence have a more or less arbitrary value when considered independently of the symbolic economy of a particularised ‘field’.

Thus, in short, civility is encoded as much in its discursive justification as in the modes and techniques of its performance. The bodily and linguistic techniques that constitute republican civility represent a form of positional capital which is differentially acquired and learned. But the normative terminology based on which these standards are articulated and enforced is itself highly idiomatic. Therefore, along with being disadvantaged in the execution or practice of republican civility, those who are castigated as uncivil in ‘republican’ terms – say, French veil wearers – cannot contest the dominant interpretation of their fraternalist duties unless they are first acculturated in the appropriate discursive-linguistic competences. They are doubly disadvantaged in the linguistic and symbolic economy of republican discourse. We can conclude that on the one hand, ‘real world’ republican discourses may, as Goodin argues, undergo a ‘communitarian slide’ and generate various exclusionary solidarities. On the other hand, however, I argue that the exclusionary nature of such discourse is located partly in its idiomatic character.

Thus to conclude, while the concept of civility as an ethical or political virtue has often been dismissed as an insidious veil for bourgeois oppression – a ‘badge of class distinction’ ¹³⁴ – this stems largely from the fact that it is constituted in performative techniques, both bodily and linguistic. Whereas the liberal concept of civility addresses itself to the problem of reasonable pluralism – the coexistence of contradictory life plans and conceptions of the good – the thicker republican version, roughly speaking, assumes a more ambitious, fraternalist vision of political community. This is precisely why, in its real-world instantiation, the republican account applies itself to ostensibly non-political forms of speech and social interaction and also why, in turn, its requirements seem so much more esoteric and encoded. And if the republican response to domination in political and social life embraces a sort of performative fraternalism that itself dominates simply by virtue of its befuddling esotericism, this casts new light on a familiar tension of republican political community.