Is French Secularism the Reason for Those Terrorist Attacks? (No.)
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Caroline Fourest is one of France’s leading thinkers on issues of secularism and religious extremism. A writer for Charlie Hebdo from 2004 to 2009, Fourest was at the forefront of defending the magazine after many of its journalists were murdered in a brutal terrorist attack in 2015. An acclaimed feminist author and director, her works have often made an impassioned case for free expression in the face of intimidation and censorship.
In this week's episode, Yascha Mounk and Caroline Fourest discuss the principles and the practice of laïcité, misconceptions of it in the United States, and her concerns over a culture of outrage that, she claims, "invades our privacy, assigns our identities, and censors our democratic exchanges."
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Podcast production by John T. Williams and Rebecca Rashid
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Brilliant and piercing discussion! Besides the most salient themes, a few other points that resonated with me: how and why immigrants from Muslim-majority nations are among the strongest supporters of laïcité; the exhaustion that many non-American liberals feel at the constant donning of the identitarian-leftist lens on policy discussions; the nuanced critique of social mobility in France as a more useful and effective way to understand the integration challenges rather than only broad appeals to nationwide laïcité-induced systemic racism.
On a different note, when Caroline first mentioned the almost victim-blaming-like view from US mainstream media, I did not immediately register it. During the original Charlie Hebdo shooting I was an overwhelmed undergrad back in India and less attuned to global news, so I only knew about the facts of the incident and not the rhetoric here. For these recent events, on the other hand, my knowledge and understanding came from The Economist (a news source I have been more frequently consulting recently compared to NYT/WaPo). After hearing this conversation, I looked through some recent NYT/WaPo articles and was indeed quite struck by some of the asking-for-it undertones. The sad irony.