The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews by Maurice Samuels (review)

French universalism is arguably confronted today with new challenges—namely the rise of religious affirmation and religious fundamentalism. In the aftermath of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre, several books have been published that purport to rethink the tenets of French secularism. Examples include polemical, essayistic, or more academic volumes by authors such as Gilles Kepel, Pierre Manent, Caroline Fourest, Patrick Weil, Régis Debray and the leading historian of laϊcité Jean Baubérot. Numerous French Muslims are demanding recognition of their difference and some are seeking special accommodations from the French Republic. While some vehemently reject the French melting pot and fear the dissolution of their identity in the secular state, others strive toward assimilation but continue to be perceived as an inassimilable difference. The French Republic may try to respond to those demands and challenges, but it is more often than not helpless because it is oblivious of its own history.

And so goes the conventional wisdom that has it that French universalism and the French Republic are in crisis.

Maurice Samuels' weighing into that vexed debate proves at once timely and untimely (in Nietzsche's sense). He brings to light that French universalism has been in crisis since its birth during the Revolution. In fact, thanks to Samuels' book, one can argue that the crisis of French universalism is the norm rather than the exception. But "crisis" comes from the Greek krinein, which means to judge, distinguish, separate. Criticism, starting with self-criticism and self-examination, then, is inherent in French universalism.

More than a dogma or an ideology, French universalism is indeed a critical tradition, perhaps a very Gallic one at that. It is inseparable from the moment when empirical, concrete man is distinguished from the abstract citizen; it is inseparable from the break that the Revolution enacts in the conception of national and civic subjectivity. Far from being a brutal amputation, as some would have it, it is a caesura resting on a philosophical reflection on the ways in which different cultures and religions can coexist as equals in a republic. Samuels reads French universalism with empathy and generosity, according to what analytic philosophers would call the "principle of charity." Rather than rejecting French universalism as one more version of French colonialism, sexism or racism (as it is often interpreted in academic circles in the U.S.), our Francophile author gives it a second chance. And that second chance he finds in cultural expressions (films, theatrical performance, and novels), because cultural expressions are hermeneutically open, and because close reading is allergic to the closure of meaning.

The originality of Samuels' book lies in its approaching the moment of definition of universalism by using the Jews as a touchstone. The Jews, in Samuels' book, although very real and historical, loom also as a prism through which the nascent French republic tried to invent and define itself. What were the conditions Jews had to fulfill to belong to the Republic? Defining those conditions amounted to defining the very identity of that Republic—a Republic that imagined itself in dialogue with its other.

The story begins a short time before the Revolution with the question of the "regeneration" of the Jews formulated in intriguing books by Abbé Grégoire, among others. Wondering how France can repair centuries of discrimination and integrate the Jews into the French nation, those books lay the ground for the famous debates on the emancipation of the Jews at the Assemblée Constituante (here we encounter an unusual Robespierre tolerant of religious difference!) and later on with Napoleon's questionnaire addressed to the rabbis of the Sanhedrin that he had convoked. Samuels shatters the cliché that Jews were asked to sacrifice their public or communal existence qua Jews on the altar of equality and emancipation. By zooming in on texts, he illustrates that French universalism from its inception has pled for a sophisticated dialectic between private and public, between religious/racial and civic identity—in...