Delphine Girard is an associate professor of classics and co-founder and spokesperson for Vigilance Collèges Lycées (VCL). She is also a member of the Council of Elders on Secularism and the Values of the Republic and vice-president of the Republic Secularism Committee (CLR).
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It was a law whose true recipients did not yet exist.
A strange law that defied the laws of time: a law that could be said to be antechronic, addressing adults still nestled in the bodies and minds of adolescents.
This is the 2004 law prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous religious clothing and symbols at school.
It is therefore not surprising, it must be said, to see it so poorly understood by a majority of our students today.
How could they, all, have the maturity to understand that a law which forces them today to dress or to communityize allows them to protect their minds tomorrow?
At an age where the gregarious impulse and the search for identity are so natural, how can we protect them from external influences and contingencies - denominational, family or political - which are so many obstacles to them becoming adults, that is to say free thinkers?
How can we make them understand that by imposing itself painfully on the adolescent now, this law protects the future citizen in them by promising them a healthy intellectual construction, that is to say free from inherited truths, community pressures, family determinisms in which our birth locks us?
An uninviting educational and political challenge, and yet, for 20 years now, secular teachers have continued to strive to explain to their students how the 2004 law is a vector of equality and a very unique opportunity in this world which we cannot stop being proud of living in France.
On this important anniversary for those who cherish secularism, I think back to Asma, this former fourth grade student to whom I once failed to convincingly explain the 2004 law...
She was a studious and reserved young girl who I knew wore a veil outside of school, which had never been a problem since she respected her ban within the establishment.
She was content to wear clothes that were always long and covered, from ankles to wrists, in summer and winter.
Brilliant and curious, she was particularly passionate about our sequence on
Le Cid
: I held her in great esteem and affection, and vice versa.
But one day, at the end of a course which had transported her to classical tragedy, I announced, not without apprehension, a trip to the theater.
Anticipating the pitfall that would arise between my student and me, I decided to take the lead by summoning her at the end of my lesson.
I then explain to her that she will not be able to wear her veil during the planned outing because the internal regulations apply there as in the establishment.
Above all, I assure her that she will not be at fault with regard to her faith since my mere presence will be enough to embody externally the rules of secular neutrality to which the students are obliged under the roof of the college.
This is to ensure the proper development of their free will.
I also announced that I was ready to explain all this to her parents if she wished, insisting above all on the fact that the play would please her, beyond her expectations...
There must be many of us on Asma's journey to give her the same speech if we want secularism to still be able to continue its work of emancipation through school.
Delphine Girard
In short, I did my best to convince her to come.
But as I feared, nothing helped: after listening to me for a moment and seeming to waver a little, she retorted, bitterly, that the veil was not imposed on her but was her choice, that if I didn't respect his free will now, he didn't care if I respected him later.
She then left the room... I didn't manage to take Asma to the theater.
I failed to make her understand that it was not about me and her, but about the Republic and its children, and the space for spiritual and philosophical unveiling that it offers to its future citizens to allow them to change their beliefs a thousand times before consciously adopting their own.
But of course, at thirteen, Asma didn't know that she hadn't yet changed her mind enough to be left locked in her original outfit.
And as she was brilliant, she thought she was wise, adult.
At the time, I had a bitter feeling of failure without fully understanding the symbolic significance of this episode.
And for good reason: it was in 2014... However, we now know how much more clearly divisive these questions have become in the aftermath of the 2015 attacks and, once the initial emotion has passed, all the damage that anti-social speeches have done to our students. -Charlie that followed.
Also read: Luc Ferry: “Why the 2004 law was necessary”
Does this failure nevertheless serve as an example?
Does this mean that the law should be changed by revisiting the Senate's recent reminders and prescriptions concerning the continuity of the principle of secularism during school trips?
Especially not !
On the contrary, there must be many of us on Asma's journey to give her the same speech if we want secularism to still be able to continue its work of emancipation through school.
Especially since only the force of a law can still give the courage to certain teachers, and only certain ones...
I would like to think that today, Asma has become an accomplished young woman, to whom others will have succeeded in making her understand how lucky she was to discover the world and others in a secular school where all identities are available to her. were open and possible.
I like to think that to this day, perhaps, she is campaigning in some student association alongside Iranian women, that she condemns on her social networks the traitors to feminism who attacked the Jewish activists of the demonstration of the 8 last December.
In short, I like to think that with or without the veil, she has become an enlightened citizen, and that she often goes to the theater.