Dhimmitude Embraced - so that's how Sarkosy will replace Chiraq
During the recent US presidential campaign, French media, reflecting public opinion, expressed total support for John Kerry and complete rejection of George W. Bush. A man who constantly mixed religion and politics was alien to France's republican and secular culture, they implied. Yet, in a classic French paradox, the book that is the talk of France today - Nicolas Sarkozy's La République, les religions, l'espérance (The Republic, religions, hope) - appears to be a challenge to France's secular tradition. The book takes the form of a dialogue between Sarkozy and two young intellectuals, one a philosopher and the other a theologian. In it, the finance minister, who will step down shortly to take on the leadership of the governing UMP party, again demonstrates his uncanny ability to attract media attention. The book puts Sarkozy himself in an unexpected light and is likely to surprise, if not unsettle friends and foes alike.
Why is a man who appears to be the ultimate incarnation of a pure politician - a 21st-century combination of his rival Jacques Chirac's activism and energy and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's constant effort to incarnate modernity - reflecting on the role of religion in society and the place of God in modern life, including his own? The answer may lie more in politics than in the shallow spiritual content of the book. Sarkozy may fail in his attempt to become France's next president, but he is already introducing a strain of modernity into the rarefied atmosphere of French politics. In the book, Mr Chirac's main rival on the right again demonstrates a talent to ask relevant questions in a challenging manner.
He starts with a quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, emphasising the need for the republican democratic model to have the support of religion: "Despotism can live without faith, but freedom cannot." For Sarkozy, "religious freedom is the freedom to hope". Spirituality is called upon to rescue the values of the Republic. Values are threatened by the failure of the institutions of the state to instil them. This failure is epitomised by France's inability to integrate 5m Muslims. This leads to a sense of exclusion and humiliation, and in turn provokes intolerance, if not violence. The old tools of successful integration - the conscript army, the school system and the churches - are no longer able to fulfil that role. The army is professional, teachers are demoralised and congregations are dwindling. |