French President François Hollande vowed Thursday to redouble efforts to teach 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 colonising 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 communties 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 January 11,” the day when more than a million demonstrators took to the streets of Paris in a show of unity following 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 lawmakers who inaugurated a law making “laïcité,” or secularism, a guiding principle of the state in 1905 had 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 Cherif and Said Kouachi, the brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo attacks, were from the “banlieu,” 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 following 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.”

The co-director of Paris-based Institute of International and Strategic Relations, Jean-Pierre Maulny, 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 non-integration in France. The other problem is these people are [ghettoized] in the same place,” Maulny 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.

What Fanon would say

If Hollande believes French Muslims need an education in secularism, Boussoumah said, then he “needs to study history.”

“Mr. Hollande has not learned anything from the history of France — the history of colonization.”

Boussoumah believes Fanon’s writings, in “Wretched of the Earth”, on the use of violence by colonized people offer important insights. Fanon, he said, explained a Manichean principle through which colonial powers “otherize” the colonized while denying their own violence and absuses.

“The Manichean principle holds that all problems come from one side. There’s a good side and a bad. In this case, the bad side is the banlieu. The other side, the good one, is France — the white side,” Boussoumah said.

Some Fanon scholars saw a familiar principle at work after the January attacks in which the French-Algerian perpetrators are denounced by many as  “barbaric,” while Charlie Hebdo magazine was deemed to symbolize democratic, universal values of freedom under siege by a class of people who just don’t get it.

France in some ways remains reminiscent of the very colonial context Fanon described, said Sara Salem, a noted Dutch-Egyptian scholar on colonialism in Europe, whose research has focused on Fanon.

The attacks on Charlie Hebdo “didn’t happen in a vacuum but in a country that has a colonial past and neocolonial present,” said Sara Salem. “And that is very clear from the aftermath — the way various actors have used it and framed it as an issue of freedom of speech, as well as the attacks on Muslims and the hostage situations today.”

Richard Gibson, a professor at Emerson College recognized by many as a leading Fanon scholar, agreed.

“We have this knee-jerk [reaction about] free speech and civil society,” Gibson said. “Of course, we are for that. But there’s an idea that everyone is equal within that. The experience of North African youth in Paris suburbs — the riots there [in 2005] express the fact that they aren’t a part of civil society.”

That context can produce violence, Gibson and Salem warned, citing Fanon’s writings that saw violence as a choice made by marginalized people with “nothing to lose and everything to gain.” The crises created by violent responses to colonialism, as in Algeria, often persuaded European powers to grant independence. Analysts like Gibson and Salem see an echo in today’s urban, socio-economically margnialized youth of the banlieue, of the colonized peasants whose turn to violence was studied by Fanon. And Boussoumah warns that the atmosphere in those neighborhoods today is dangerously close to the one before the 2005 riots, which created the last major social crisis that left the authorities no choice but to pay attention.