Secularism, the French & Alfred Dreyfus

Several hundred Parisians gathered at City Hall yesterday to pay tribute to a French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus,who was convicted wrongly of treason in a trial that divided France more than a century ago. The commemorative gathering, organized by CRIF, an umbrella group of French-Jewish organizations, took place in advance of the 100th anniversary of the Jewish officer's exoneration on July 12. In honor of the occasion next week, President Chirac will participate in a ceremony at the military school where Captain Dreyfus was stripped of his rank as tens of thousands of Parisians called for his death.

The conviction and imprisonment of Dreyfus dominated political discourse in France for more than a decade, separating the populace between the "Dreyfusards," who wanted him exonerated, and the "anti-Dreyfusards," who did not. A distinguished French novelist, Émile Zola, became the most renowned "Dreyfusard," when, in 1898, he published in a French newspaper "J'accuse" -- a letter calling the French government anti-Semitic and the Dreyfus verdict a miscarriage of justice.

"More than a century after the French Revolution granted legal equality to Jews, the Dreyfus Affair showed that almost half of France, if not more, was openly anti-Semitic," a French political scientist, Jean-Yves Camus, said.

The scandal is widely credited with inspiring France to enact comprehensive legislation separating church and state, and, ultimately, to embrace laïcité, or secularism, as a Gallic value. "It was the Dreyfus Affair that signaled the defeat, and therefore the retreat, of the old idea of 'l'Église au pouvoir,'"a French philosopher and leading public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy, told The New York Sun, referring to the notion that the Roman Catholic Church was France's supreme power broker.

To this day, laïcité shapes the nation's pervasive assimilationist paradigm -- that is, in the public sphere, those who choose to live in France are supposed to be, first and foremost, French. Expressions of faith, creed, or ethnicity are to take place in private. In line with this policy of fervent secularism, France, in 2004, banned Islamic headscarves, Jewish skullcaps, and other religious symbols in public schools.

"The headscarf for many French people stands for a difference that makes a difference," the author of the forthcoming book, "Why The French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space," John Bowen, said. Mr. Bowen teaches anthropology and political and social theory at Washington University. "It sends the message: I'm not going to be just like you, and that message is not well received in [the] classic French concept of integration."

•	Secularism, the French & Alfred Dreyfus Culture Desk The New York Sun, Friday, July 7, 2006 Byline: Gabrielle Birkner