‘Secular Retaliation’: A Case Study of Integralist Populism, Anti-Muslim Discourse, and (Il)liberal Discourse on Secularism in Contemporary France

In this article, the author conducts a qualitative discourse analysis of the editorials of French online journal Riposte Laïque Secular Retaliation between 2007 and 2015. The journal gathers activists from all over the political spectrum – from left-wing union representatives to right-wing ultranationalists. Their common goal is the will to purify the French nation from an asserted ongoing Islamic occupation. To the journal's writers, secularism appears both as a threatened identity and as a technique for fighting back against the imagined occupation. The purpose of the article is to map out the major discursive foundations of RL with the aim of broadening the understanding of contemporary French secularism as a mode of identity and as a political and social practice.