Chapter one. The crisis of multiculturalism, new assimilationism and secularism
Chapter two. Assimilation in the French sociology of incorporation from a multicultural perspective Introduction: Why reintroduce assimilation?
1. Gérard Noiriel. Writing the history of power in the context of migration
2. A multicultural perspective: I been in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time
Chapter three. The new liberal sociology of assimilation and its transnationalist alternatives
Introduction: The international sociological debate about assimilation and its normative implications
1. Critique of postnationalism, multiculturalism and integration
2. The alternatives proposed by the ‘liberal assimilationists’
3. Complications for a diagnosis: ‘On their turf’
4. Alternatives
5. Against the new discourses of assimilation
Transit I: To the Proustian pluriverse or Proust as a witness of assimilation in nineteenth19th-century France
Europe; initial connections with the secularism-religion framework
Chapter four. Alfred Bloch’s personal integration test at the threshold of the protagonist’s family’s home
1. ‘And what’s the name of this friend of yours who is coming this evening?’
2. The Revolution’s conditions of Emancipation
3. Bloch coping with paradox
Chapter five. Stuck in a revolving door. Cultural memory, assimilation and secularisation
Introduction: Assimilation, cultural memory and metaphor
1. Bloch and his family being ‘picturesque rather than pleasing’ at the beach
2. Hannah Arendt reads Proust; from Judaism to Jewishness
3. Scratching the surface; Zygmunt Bauman and the paradoxes of assimilation
4. ‘A consubstantial malaise of republican society’
Transit II: Laïcité and assimilation in the Third Republic and today
Chapter six. Elements for a critique of the laïcité¬-religion framework
Introduction: Towards a genealogy of the laïcité¬-religion framework
1. Laïcité and neo-Kantian liberalism
2. Kant at school; Durkheim and Buisson
3. The genealogy of the religious ‘sign’ with a French twist towards ordre public
Chapter seven. Secularism, sociology, security
Introduction: The sociology of secularisation and the normative concept of laïcité
1. The Stasir Report: Un rapport sans médiation
2. Secularism or democratic multiculturalism?
Chapter eight. The highly precarious structure of assimilation: modernist philosophical schemes, memory and the Proustian narrative
Introduction: The invention of tense pasts ‘after’ assimilation
1. Adorno and Benjamin on assimilation and the rejection of Swann
2. Public and private Dreyfusism
3. The social discipline of forgetting
Democratic memory
1. The assimilation of the French Jews as a memory for today
2. Getting stuck in a revolving door in the early twenty-first21st century
3. Problematising the laïcité-religion framework instead of defining a better laicité
4. Multicultural alternatives