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978 90 8964 596 8
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Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of Multiculturalism
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Secularism, Assimilation
and the Crisis of Multiculturalism
French Modernist Legacies
Yolande Jansen
iMiSCoe Research
Front cover art: Eva Meijer
Colour editing front cover image: Daphne Rosenthal and Wouter van Riessen
Back cover image: ‘Choisis, tu es libre’, cartoon by Auguste Roubille for
L’Assiette au Beurre, 1904
Cover design: Studio Jan de Boer bno, Amsterdam
Layout: Trees Vulto dtp and book production, Schalkwijk
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the us
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isbn 978 90 8964 596 8
e-isbn 978 90 4852 213 2 (pdf)
e-isbn 978 90 4852 214 9 (ePub)
nur 610
© Yolande Jansen / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written per-
mission of both the copyright owners and the authors of the book.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements 9
1 Introduction
The crisis of multiculturalism, new assimilationism
and secularism 13
1.1 Contours of the book 13
1.2 Zigzagging between assimilation and multiculturalism 20
1.3 Where the secularism-religion framework comes in:
A bifurcation within multiculturalism 38
1.4 The paradoxes of Jewish assimilation in France and the prism of
In Search of Lost Time 46
1.5 outline of the chapters 51
1.6 Disciplinary note 55
2 Assimilation in the French sociology of incorporation from a
multicultural perspective 59
2.1 Why reintroduce assimilation? 59
2.2 Gérard Noiriel: Writing the history of power in the context of migration 61
2.3 A multicultural perspective: ‘i been in the right place, but it must have
been the wrong time’ 73
3 The liberal sociology of assimilation and citizenship and its
transnationalist alternatives 83
3.1 A sociological debate about assimilation and its normative implications
for multiculturalism 83
3.2 Critique of postnationalism, multiculturalism and integration 84
3.3 The alternatives proposed by the ‘liberal assimilationists’ 90
3.4 Complications for a diagnosis: ‘on their turf’ 96
3.5 Alternatives 102
3.6 Against the new discourses of assimilation 108
TRANSIT I
Proust as a witness of assimilation in 19th-century France 117
4 Alfred Bloch’s personal integration test at the threshold of his
friend’s home 137
4.1 ‘And what’s the name of this friend of yours who is coming this evening?’ 137
4.2 The Revolution’s conditions of emancipation 140
4.3 Bloch coping with paradox 151
4.4 Partiality, perspectivism and assimilation 155
5 Stuck in a revolving door
Cultural memory, assimilation and secularisation 165
5.1 Assimilation, metaphor and cultural memory 165
5.2 Hannah Arendt reads Proust; from Judaism to Jewishness 176
5.3 ‘The Christians at the surface’; Zygmunt Bauman and the
paradoxes of assimilation 179
5.4 ‘A consubstantial malaise of republican society’ 184
TRANSIT II
Laïcité and assimilation in the Third Republic and today 195
6 Elements of a critique of the laïcité-religion framework 203
6.1 Towards a genealogy of the laïcité-religion framework 203
6.2 Laïcité and neo-Kantian liberalism 204
6.3 Kant at school; Durkheim and Buisson 212
6.4 Privileging Protestantism and the genealogy of the religious
sign with a French twist towards ordre public 216
7 Secularism, sociology and security 225
7.1 The sociology of secularisation, normative laïcité and multiculturalism 225
7.2 The Stasi report: Un rapport sans médiation 226
7.3 Secularism or democratic multiculturalism? 229
7.4 Postmodern identity politics and security 236
8 The highly precarious structure of assimilation
Modernist philosophical schemes, memory and the Proustian
narrative 253
8.1 The invention of tense pasts after assimilation 253
8.2 Adorno’s and Benjamin’s exchange about assimilation and the rejection
of Swann 255
8.3 Public and private Dreyfusism 258
8.4 The social discipline of forgetting 265
8.5 Forgetting and cultural memory 268
9 Concluding remarks 275
9.1 introduction 275
9.2 The assimilation of the French Jews as a memory for today 275
9.3 Getting stuck in a revolving door in the early 21st century 277
9.4 Problematising the laïcité-religion framework instead of defining a
‘better’ laïcité 282
9.5 Multicultural alternatives 287
Notes 297
Works cited 311
Index 333
Acknowledgements
One of the things that kept me going while writing this book was the
thought that it would one day be finished and I would be able to write
the acknowledgments, in which I would finally give a place to the team
that sustained me. A range of people and institutions made this study
possible. First of all, I would like to thank the supervisors of my PhD
dissertation, which formed the basis of this book: Ieme van der Poel
and Veit Bader. I greatly benefited from Van der Poel’s great knowl-
edge of French studies and of the work of Marcel Proust in particular.
Bader’s enormous erudition both in sociology and in social and politi-
cal philosophy, particularly his interest in multiculturalism and secu-
larism, has been invaluable to me.
The time taken to write this book was made available to me thanks
to the support of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (asca),
the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (nwo) and the
Amsterdam Center for Globalisation Studies (acgs).
I received helpful comments on my dissertation and on later articles
which contributed to this book from many people. I especially thank
Murat Aydemir, Rainer Bauboeck, John Bowen, Sudeep Dasgupta,
René Gabriëls, Edward Hughes, Jo Labanyi, Irena Rosenthal, Eliza-
beth Shakman Hurd, Samia Touati, Markha Valenta, Hent de Vries
and Marc de Wilde, and finally the anonymous readers from the imis-
coe Editorial Committee.
At the University of Amsterdam, Karen Vintges, Ruth Sonderegger,
Pieter Pekelharing, Robin Celikates, Marieke Borren, Karin de Boer,
Beate Roessler, Eloe Kingma, Jantine van Gogh, Dorota Mokrosinska,
Victor Kal, Noortje Marres, Marie-Aude Baronian and Stephan Besser
were among my most inspiring colleagues.
I further thank my colleagues within the nwo project The Sacred
and the Secular: Genealogies of Self, State and Society in the Contempo-
rary Islamic World: Michiel Leezenberg, Mariwan Kanie, Ruud Peters
and Peter van der Veer enabled me to continue my research about sec-
ularity and Islam in the European context, and to broaden my view by
taking into account a postcolonial perspective. Meeting Darius Rejali
in the context of this project was a source of great inspiration.
