There’s been some tumult in France lately over desecrated Muslim graves in a WWI cemetery.

In staunchly secular (“laïque”) France, these graves—maintained by the government—are one of very few public concessions to religious identity. To vandalize the headstones is to attack Muslim presence and difference.

The trouble is that the logic of French secular republican thought inevitably eliminates any religious, racial, or other “communal” identities from the discussion, leaving us with bizarre answers. So an MP and author of a newly-minted report of grave vandalism, tells Le Monde that only one out of every eight of these incidents per year is racial in character, stemming rather from “stupidity, alcohol and drugs,” and a society-wide disrespect for the dead. Ignoring racial attacks, his solution, of course, is to have a unit on death in the high schools. And so on as we talk past each other.

Since this situation isn’t going to clear up anytime soon, a more interesting question to me is: who were these soldiers? North African colonials, most likely. But who were they? This one above, from the same cemetery, simply reads “Boungab Douadi Ben Amor” (sounds like an Algerian name), “Soldier, 1st RT,” and “Died for France, the 25th May 1915”. If we had access to all the records, we could find out lots, I suppose.

[photo credit: flickr user Laurent LAMACZ]