Quebec's Charter of Values: from Huguenots to the Hijab

In order to understand where the Quebec Charter of “Values” comes from, one must look into history – in particular French (and some German) history. We see that Quebec’s PQ government is inspired by legislation from the Fifth French Republic. In March 2004 the French government voted overwhelmingly for a ban of “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation within the school system. In theory the ban applies equally to all those who live in France, but it is essentially directed against headscarf-wearing Muslim girls, who appear to resist “neutral” secular modernity endorsed since the Third Republic. Republican political allegiance requires that the individual adhere to the State, and because it exercises “power” on the public (not unlike – it is argued – people of ‘conspicuous’ faith) so French liberal thinking deems that religious affiliation should not have undue expression - or ‘influence’ - in the school system.

Article One of the French legislation states:

In public elementary, middle and high schools, the wearing of signs or clothing which conspicuously manifest students’ religious affiliation is prohibited. Disciplinary procedures to implement this rule will be preceded by a discussion with the student. [1]

It continues with an explanation of the term ”conspicuous”:

The clothing and religious signs prohibited are conspicuous signs such as a large cross, a veil, or a skullcap. Not regarded as signs indicating religious affiliation are discreet signs, which can be, for example, medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, or small Korans.[2]

These terms must sound eerily familiar to Canadians today. Not unlike French Republicans, Quebec political leaders, too, are careful to delineate the difference between “conspicuous” and “non-conspicuous” items of wear, and PQ government officials took the measure of publishing pictograms (for presumably the less literate among the public) of what was acceptable and what was not.[3] Church and State have been officially separate in France since 1905, with secularization of education beginning in earnest in the early Third Republic under the Ferry laws of the 1880’s, when elementary-grade schooling came under the control of the French state and declared mandatory. Quebec followed almost a century later with the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960’s, when laïcité first was introduced to la belle province. Today a large proportion of the French and Quebec populations are considerably post-religious, yet in the interest of so-called fairness we see that both governments are determined to clamp down on “conspicuous” persons wearing “large” crosses.

However, the experience of France and Quebec is different. Out of a total population of 66 million, France has approximately 5 million Muslims, or 7.5% of the total population. It is also estimated that less than 2,000 women in France wear either the niqab or burka, or 0.04% of the Muslim population[4]. In Quebec there are about 250,000 Muslims out of a total provincial population of 8 million “souls”, or 3.1% of the population. Relatively speaking, France has more than twice as many Muslims than Quebec, and it has the legacy of colonialism and deep memories of war with Algeria, to boot. France began its laïcité by focussing primarily on its school system, while today Quebec is looking to impose laicite on its entire public service AND the private sector. And if we are to use the same French rate for the number of niqab or burka clad women in Quebec there might be as many as 10 such people in the entire province. Simply put (because it bears repeating): there might be only about ten people in all of Quebec who actually conceal their faces from the public by means of veil - yet the might of the PQ government is clamping down in the name of “secularism”. Generally-speaking the French experience with laïcité can be seen to operate out of a republican and (later) feminist inspiration, while in Quebec the PQ caters to misguided ‘opinion’ while clearly importing French republicanism. It is worth remarking that the PQ appears just as illiberal as the comparable faction behind the “Harper government”.

There is a clear difference in dynamics in France than in Quebec. France has had a long legacy of statism: the state is regarded as a social good; it looks out for the “general will,” and we can see that in the French Revolution as well as Napoleon. The French find liberty in conjunction with the state (we find it in Rousseau, well-known for his “forced to be free” argument which prefigures Robespierre) unlike the Anglo-American tradition which sees liberty in opposition to the state, notions which emerged from the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, as well as from the Huguenot tradition, which we find in Locke.

In Quebec today one finds similar elements of French statism, but the PQ veer on a kind of imperial secularism which brings us to the more to the pre-Revolutionary era of Louis XIV’s absolutism, a period with which Quebec is better acquainted, given that their link with France was severed with the Seven Years’ War, apparently finalized in 1763. In effect the PQ threaten to revisit Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1685, when Henri IV’s act of “toleration” of French Protestants was declared illegal in the name of “unity” – so Protestants were to be converted to Catholicism. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Huguenots were persecuted, thus making their way to the Netherlands, Germany, and North America. It was a significant knock to the French economy, for many Huguenots were from the commercial and industrial classes – and very mobile. PQ leader Pauline Marois is inviting such a migration of the “ethnic vote” from Quebec today; either that, or she wants return the province to the era of the French Wars of Religion, characteristic of the late 16th century.

France has not had a great legacy of religious toleration, and French thinking has always been more “clear and distinct” (as Descartes would have it) than that of the thinking across the channel (mind you, the Irish were clearly and distinctly discriminated against by the English). But the point is that French reasoning lends itself to the state – not against it. Similarly the ‘individual’ is less apparent in French thinking; ‘he’ or ‘she’ is conceived more sociologically than empirically, which is possibly why we are witnessing an ‘alternative’ expression of laïcité by the French. In other words, French liberalism is abstract and disembodied: individuals are not involved; the individual is “erased” from French liberalism, as Lucien Jaume has explained.[5]

The overall impact of the French Revolution bears witness to the problems France face’s today. Its legacy was égalité. According to Francois Guizot, France’s 19th century Protestant historian and one-time Prime Minister (a conservative liberal with a strong influence on Alexis de Tocqueville), the French Revolution did away with feudalism and “intermediate powers” – including the powers of the Catholic Church – so nothing remained between government and its citizens.[6] Unlike England, which retained its “local powers”, thanks (or no thanks) to its aristocracy and its implicit inequality, France had nothing to act as a bulwark against the state, because everyone is considered politically equal. Today in France, because of Revolutionary - and Republican moments, the state is viewed with prestige: it is all-knowing and it is there to tutor the people.[7] Because Muslim culture in France appears distinct (ironically faceless in some instances), Muslims are consequently less easily integrated into “neutral” and abstract units of French citizen sameness.

The other problem that France faces is that it has never had a successful Protestant Reformation.[8] After the French Revolution granted civic rights to Protestants in 1789 and religious freedom in the Charter of 1814 (when Catholicism was declared the state religion under Louis XVIII) we find that France’s most liberal thinkers were Protestants – not Catholics.[9] French Protestant liberals of the 19th century include Benjamin Constant and Madame de Stael, daughter of famed Jacques Necker (Louis XVI’s last Finance Minister), who originated from Geneva. The great aristocratic-liberal thinker Montesquieu, author of The Spirit of the Laws (1748) is something of an exception but he predates the Revolution and married a Huguenot. Montesquieu advocated religious tolerance (in an era when harried Huguenots numbered 2 or 3 percent of the total French population), and he understood the “virtue” of a Republic to be its “love” for equality, an affect seemingly missing from the French legislation of 2004. France’s other great, early liberal thinker, by the way, Alexis de Tocqueville (author of the classic work Democracy in America) married an English woman.

In other words, religion plays a role in French liberalism but what is absent from France is a deeper sense of the Reformation, for example a Martin Luther, or (perhaps more indigenously) a Jean Calvin (who escaped Paris and found safety in Geneva). Let us first consider what Luther has to say about the separation of Church and State in 1523:

If the emperor’s power extended to God’s kingdom and God’s power, and were not something distinct and separate, there would be no point in distinguishing the two. But, as has been said, the soul is not subject to the emperor’s power. He can neither teach nor guide it; he cannot kill it or bring it to life; he cannot bind or loose it, judge it or sentence it, hold it or release it. And yet he would need to [be competent to do all of these] if he were to have the power to legislate for it and issue orders to it. But as to goods and honour, here is his proper domain. For such things are subject to his power.[10]

Luther continues On Secular Authority:

My good Lord, I owe you obedience with my life and goods. Command me what lies within the limits of your authority, and I will obey. But if you command me to believe, or to surrender my books, I will not obey. For then you [will have] become a tyrant and overreach[ed] yourself, commanding where you have neither right or power. If he then takes away your goods and punishes you for your disobedience, then blessed are you, and you should thank God for counting you worthy to suffer for the sake of his Word. Let the fool rage; he shall surely find his judge. But I say to you: if you do not resist him and let him take away your faith or your books, then you will truly have denied God.[11]

We observe here the emergence of the Lutheran doctrine of resistance which was more fully articulated and endorsed in 1530. As the eminent Quentin Skinner points out, the doctrine of lawful resistance is more authentically Lutheran – not Calvinist, though the reverse has been usually perceived to be the case, possibly since the First or Second World Wars.[12]

What has this to do with Quebec’s Charter of Values? We see clearly from Luther and the Reformation that political resistance has a religious impetus, hence Protestantism. This sense was somewhat duplicated by Calvin but only in a manner which invited “self-conscious caution”.[13] Resistance found considered voice under Calvin’s continental disciples (see my blog), especially in the light of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 - and certainly under the influence of Scottish and English radicalism. So when a modern state today wants to eliminate ‘conspicuous’ signs of religious ‘influence’ it is also eliminating the right to constitutional resistance which was at the heart of the Reformation. The harmless hijab is an expression of conscience and resistance to the state, but “neutrality” is just another word for desired “non-resistance” (thereby increasing public apathy), and this can be harmful in a pluralist society – or any democracy for that matter. In other words, “neutrality” only adds to the state; this is not a plus. Moreover, post-religious reliance, or faith, in the state’s role and capacity to control religion is of dubious merit.

In Geneva Calvinism approached something of an ecclesiastical police state (not unlike Harper’s Canada); meanwhile Quebec is reliving the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[14] These two opposing poles of French history, one authoritarian and the other excluded and authoritarian, are alive and well in Canada today. We also see that France overcame its Protestant Reformation, and because of this it has a poor, if not odd, tradition of liberalism, despite generations of republicanism, so are their secular laws worth emulating? Meanwhile Quebec’s relationship with the Reformation (and its erstwhile Protestant or English-speaking minority) has been reversed - and in a number of ways corrected – certainly by the Quiet Revolution and less so by successive acts of PQ “sovereignty”. Across the Atlantic, but especially in Quebec, notions of Papal “infallibility” and the “seamless” robe have now found severe, contemporary inversions by means of state-led laïcité.





[1] Quoted in Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 1.
[2] Ibid., p. 1.
[3] Globe and Mail, “Quebec draws its line,” Wednesday, September 11, 2013.
[4] See Sheema Khan’s column, Globe and Mail, Friday January 29, 2010. Khan mistakenly calculates the figures as “0.004%”.
[5]Lucien Jaume has written an interesting book with this topic in mind: L’individu effacé, ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français, Paris: Fayard, 1997. See also Celine Spector “Was Montesquieu liberal? The Spirit of the Laws in the history of liberalism” in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the present day, ed. Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 65.
[6] Lucien Jaume, “The unity, diversity and paradoxes of French liberalism,” in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to Present Day, p. 49.
See how François Guizot praises feudalism as a form of resistance, as well as its Germanic roots, along with Luther in The History of Civilization in Europe, tr. William Hazlitt, ed, Larry Siedentop (Toronto: Penguin), pp. 79 and 202,3.
[7] Ibid., p. 54.
[8] See Helena Rosenblatt, “On the need for a Protestant Reformation: Constant, Sismondi, Guizot and Laboulaye” in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to Present Day, pp. 115-133.
[9] See George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 94.
[10] Luther, “On Secular Authority” in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. and tr. Harro Höpfl (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 28.
[11] Ibid., p. 29. Emphasis added.
[12] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. 2: The Age of the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2010), p. 206.
[13] Ibid., p. 221.
[14] Francois Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, tr. Philip Mairet (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002), p. 85. See my forthcoming blog entry.