What would Fanon say about François Hollande’s France?

French President François Hollande vowed Thursday to redouble efforts to bolster secularism in schools — part of his attempt to better integrate the nation’s marginalized minorities after the deadly attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket last month, whose perpetrators had been French nationals with origins in the nation’s Muslim-majority former colonies.

But some political analysts and Muslim community leaders see in the premise of Hollande's proposals a continuation of mistakes first critiqued by philosopher Frantz Fanon in the context of Algeria's war of independence. Fanon, who hailed from Martinique, was a groundbreaking theorist in the psychology of race and colonialism, and a leading theorist for the National Liberation Front that led Algeria's fight for independence from France. And he warned that the problem of violence could not be understood and addressed if the colonizing power failed to address its own history of violence and how it had marginalized its colonial subjects. 

Nor are Fanon scholars alone in being troubled by the French government's tendency to frame the problem of violence emanating from the marginalized suburbs populated by people with roots in France's former colonies, simply as a cultural problem — a failure of these children of mostly Muslim immigrants to properly embrace a French identity.  

That's the logic of enforcing secularism. Former President Jacques Chirac’s administration banned students from wearing hijab — Muslim head coverings — and other overt signs of religious identity in 2004. While that move was framed as a protection of a French secular identity that all citizens should embrace, many Muslim immigrant communities saw it as an act of repression against their beliefs.

Now Hollande is promising to reinforce secularism, for example through strengthening French language instruction to bolster democratic participation. His speech was billed as an attempt to revive the spirit of Jan. 11, the day when more than a million demonstrators took to the streets of Paris in a show of unity after the killings at Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket.

Officials from Hollande’s administration were not immediately available for comment, and the nation's Education Ministry declined to offer details of the educational reforms proposed on Thursday.

Although the exact proposed changes to curricula were unclear, “we can guess what [Hollande] means” by secularism, said Laurent Levy, a lawyer and popular writer on French social issues. Levy said French legislators who adopted a law making laïcité, or secularism, a guiding principle of the state in 1905 intended the term to refer to a separation between church and state. However, “for the last 10 years, there’s been another concept of secularism … that not just the state, but people must be neutral to religion,” he said, “That, to me, is rather totalitarian.”

Some analysts have suggested that the assailants in the January attacks — although they were reportedly operating on the behalf of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and of ISIL — had been alienated from French society by the chronic failure of the country's integration policy. International media noted that Chérif Kouachi and Saïd Kouachi, the brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo attacks, were from the banlieues, the suburbs where ghettoized communities with roots in former colonies face chronic unemployment and allegedly heavy-handed policing.

That situation in those communities is reaching a boiling point, according to Paris-based Muslim community leader and minority rights activist Youssef Boussoumah, as it did in riots in the suburbs of France's major cities after incidents of police brutality in 2005. Boussoumah says that instead of addressing the economic and social issues behind the discontent of Muslims living in France’s suburbs — which a Fox News guest last month inaccurately called “no-go zones” for non-Muslims — Hollande’s speech advances the idea that the problem is cultural.

“The culture issue is a pretext,” he said, adding that he believes it’s not religious beliefs that are keeping young people in the suburbs from feeling a part of the French state or embracing its national identity.

The government “refuses to face the real problems behind a lack of integration,” Boussoumah said. “Instead they are pushing the popular idea that if poor communities have problems, it’s a lack of cultural integration.”

Jean-Pierre Maulny, a co-director of Paris-based Institute of International and Strategic Relations, said that while pushing secularism is “better than” no talk of integration policy at all, it’s a “short-term solution to a long-term problem” of marginalization and the burgeoning security threat some say it poses.

“There is more and more poverty, with no hope of finding employment ... That is the major reason for nonintegration in France. The other problem is these people are [ghettoized] in the same place,” he said. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls caused a stir when late last month, after the attacks, he described the ghettoization of communities of color as “apartheid” and called to fight the de facto segregation of French Muslims.