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State, Republic and the Minority: The (un)making of Muslims in France  
Review by Simi K. Salim  
 
Constructing Muslims in France: Discourse, Public Identity, and the Politics of Citizenship  
By Jennifer Fredette 
Temple University Press, 2014 
 
Key words: France, French Muslim, Modern State, Republicanism, identity, immigrants, refugee 
 

Jennifer Fredette analyzes the construction of Muslim citizenship in France by examining the 
discourses surrounding Muslim identity - primarily by elites and by Muslims themselves. 
Drawing on studies by Ange Marie Hancock and Kathleen Moore on post 9/11 Muslim identity 
formation in the United States, Fredette correlates power politics and citizenship – with the 
elites, primarily bureaucrats and the media, framing Muslims as the “radical Other” (8). The 
book locates Muslims as a heterogeneous category marked by diverse class locations and socio-
political orientations. This is significant as former studies on Muslims in France have centered 
primarily on religiosity, locating Muslims as a homogenous social group. The first chapter 
problematizes the idea of citizenship and rights discourse in modern secular societies and 
discusses the “paradoxes of modern citizenship” (5) which involves the construction of a 
normative citizen and its ‘Other’- hence embodying a principle of exclusion. Drawing on Joan 
Wallach Scott, Fredette regards the French idea of citizenship as centered on masculinity, 
cultural singularity, and irrelegiosity – with the Muslims and immigrants becoming the religious 
and sexual aberrants. The French model of citizenship revolves around “difference-blind cultural 
republicanism” (154) which frames the normative culture as French and an exclusive model of 
equality overlooking class, race and gendered identities. Fredette, through a series of interviews, 
traces the discursive formations of Muslim identity centered on education, employment and 
housing for Muslims in France.  

Chapter 4 and 5 discusses the education and employment of French Muslims. The presiding 
narrative on Muslim education is centered upon religiosity and an anxiety over the hijab - with 
scarce attention paid to the inequities Muslims face in the education and employment sector. 
Fredette regards schools as a replica of the state which plays a cardinal role in modeling the 
‘ideal French citizen’- marked by its exclusionary nature and overlooking of racial, ethnic and 



 
 

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gendered identities. The exclusionary nature of state institutions is not solely a Muslim crisis and 
is shared by immigrants and working class French citizens. The elite discourse, Fredette says, 
has framed Muslims as “dangerous employees” (107) with the bureaucrats paralleling Muslim 
employment to Islamization of French society. The diverse experientiality and privilege locations 
among French Muslims in response to Fredette’s interview is significant – with white Muslims 
narrating a significant lack of discrimination as compared to Arab men who are often vilified in 
public discourses.   

The spatiality of French Muslims as a territorial and psychic coordinate is central to this study 
with the housing and spatial location affecting the experientiality of being a Muslim in France. 
Tracing the historicity of Muslim housing in France, Fredette notes how the everydayness of 
Muslims are linked to narratives of violence and riots in the suburbs and the emergence of 
fundamentalist Islam. The idea of a Muslim space is shifted to be a “radicalized, ethnic, religious 
danger” influenced by “macho/basement Islam” (130). Ghettoization of Muslim communities 
has profound underpinnings socially and economically – with poorly maintained buildings and 
rampant rise of unemployment in the suburbs. Intersectionality and locating structural iniquity of 
Muslims demarcates Fredette’s study- for instance, on locating the spatial segregation of 
Muslims, she brings in the predicament of immigrant North African women and the gendered 
nature of cultural, linguistic and economic inequity.  

Extending her analysis to the French model of citizenship, Fredette in the concluding chapter 
engages in a critique of the multiple models of republicanism. Fredette extends Scott’s critique 
of the modern democratic state and its racial, ethnic and gendered othering to the elite/public 
discourses on French citizenship. The republican model is portrayed as “difference-blind” (154) 
– similar to color blind racial politics in the US – overlooking racial, ethnic and gendered 
hardships of immigrants and hence invisibilising structural and cultural inequity. Public 
discourse on French Muslims depends primarily on narratives by French elites on Muslim 
religiosity and homogeneity. These meaning makings on Muslims are in short of oppositional 
claims due to “cultural and institutional” barriers and “centralized nature of French Politics” 
(159). Cardinal in Fredette’s study is her analysis of the lack of a shared counter narrative among 
Muslims - with multiple Muslims in her ethnographic interview embracing French republicanism 
while many others struggling with the hybrid identities of being French and a Muslim.   

With xenophobia and anti-immigrant narratives gaining currency is Europe and elsewhere, 
Fredette’s study is extremely pertinent in its unraveling of the bleak underbellies of 
republicanism, democracy and the modern nation state in itself. Rightly locating the anti-Muslim 
discourse as a narrative and affirmative ideology in France, what earmarks Fredette’s study is her 
intersectional positionality - addressing simultaneously race, gender and ethnic locations of 
immigrants. Breaking through the homogeneity of official claims on Muslim religiosity, Fredette 
has moved beyond – with the interviewees at times appropriating or even negating their hybrid 
identities.   



 
 

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Works Cited 

Hancock, Ange- Marie. 2004. The politics of disgust: The public identity of the welfare queen. 
New York: New York University Press. 

Moore, Kathleen. 2010. The unfamiliar abode: Islamic law in the United States and Britain. New 
York: Oxford University Press. 

Scott, Joan Wallach. 2005. Parité! Sexual equality and the crisis of French universalism. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press 

Simi K. Salim is a Doctoral Research Scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social 
Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Her broad research area includes narratives of 
Muslim women, sacred spaces, Postcolonial feminism(s), Postsecular studies and post 9/11 
Literature.  

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© 2019 Simi K. Salim 

 


