The French Republic Unveiled

Abstract

In the Marx Brothers’ classic film, A Day at the Races , Groucho taunts his habitual rival, Herman Gottlieb, with the comment ‘Don’t point that beard at me — it might go off.’ This is not so far-fetched. In the debate on the ban on ostentatious signs of religious affiliation in French schools in 2004, 2 it was suggested by the French Education Minister, Luc Ferry, that beards of a certain length and worn in a particular way could indeed be a weapon, admittedly a cultural/political weapon rather than a piece of deadly hardware but no less dangerous for that. Worn by a Muslim and interpreted by the state as a sign of religious affiliation (and, as such, breaching the long-standing secular code of French schooling, i.e. laïcité ) the beard could signal a challenge to the very principles of the Republic, despite the fact that Jules Ferry, Clemenceau and other giants of the French Third Republic sported, apparently unashamedly, an abundance of facial hair. As David Macey notes ironically, Jules Ferry’s beard ‘was presumably a republican beard ’. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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