Word: frenchness
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...right to do so, even in eyes of those Americans who are most hostile to foreign ways of living. It matters not whether these women wear the burka in public or in private, because their “rights” are the same. However, public space in the French scheme of things is not just a non-private and therefore public space by virtue of default. It’s a universalist space where citizens interact. From a French perspective, refusing to show your face in a public space is a refusal not just of custom, but of interactive...
...head and in my heart, full as it is with the memories of a French childhood, I do so dislike the burka that outlawing it in France seems to me to be more or less acceptable, even if that should not be the case in the United States. It has no place in French life and history, and outlawing the burka might well have been one of the very few items of public policy on which Robespierre and Marie-Antoinette, or Joan of Arc and the Marquis de Sade, would have readily agreed...
Wanting to wear the burka seems to me to be a self-inflicted wound that I just can’t accept. In this symbolic matter, the French tradition seems to me to be for France, at least, the more plausible alternative: for France, and eventually, for all women everywhere...
Patrice L. R. Higonnet ’58 is the Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard. He is a member of the Center for European Studies...
After Jennings was selected for a small sophomore tutorial taught by French History Professor Patrice L. R. Higonnet ’58, Jennings decided to study French history—though he added that, at that point in his life, he was lacking the “sophistication and understanding” to explore other academic disciplines...