In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders, we heard a great deal about “republican values.” Indeed, some French people seem to have heard too much; a recent opinion poll claimed that 65 percent of French people thought terms like “republican values” had been “used too much and had lost their force and meaning.”

Central among those republican values is laïcité — a French term that has so many connotations and interpretations that it is effectively untranslatable, though secularism is a reasonable approximation. Today laïcité serves as a justification for a variety of things — from banning headscarf-wearing mothers from accompanying their children on school outings to telling Muslim and Jewish schoolchildren that they must eat pork or go hungry.

But laïcité is not simply an idea that has been appropriated by the Right for political or cultural ends; it is also a value claimed by the Left, even the far left.