What the French Ban on Head Scarves Says About France

In France this month, public schools reopened with surprisingly few confrontations regarding the ban on Muslim head scarves – as well as other “ostentatious” religious symbols – passed by the French National Assembly last spring and put in effect with the beginning of the school year. Girls who arrived at school wearing scarves pushed them off on entering the school grounds; others opted for smaller “bandannas” that passed as fashion rather than religious statements. Days before, the kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq had rallied the nation in solidarity, and their captors’ demand for the repeal of the head scarf ban had the opposite of its intended effect, as the vast majority of French Muslims, even those who opposed the law, denounced the attempt at intimidation.

Many Americans on both left and right are puzzled by the French action to ban head scarves from schools, seeing them as manifestations of religious freedom that the state ought to protect rather than prohibit. The Bush administration has condemned the law, and small protests took place in the United States as elsewhere when the law was passed last spring. Conflict over the head scarf is certainly not confined to France. All over the Muslim and non-Muslim world, the head scarf has emerged as a contentious symbol of religious identity standing in for a number of deeper issues regarding religious freedom, secularization, and the rights of women.

In France, although the head scarf question has simmered for well over a decade, the passage of a law banning scarves from public schools reflects heightened anxiety since September 11, 2001 about the integration of five million Muslims into French society. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe, as well as one of the lowest rates of religious practice among its nominally Catholic population. The rise of Muslim fundamentalism worldwide and in France itself therefore appears as a challenge to modern, secular French values, reinforced by fear of terrorism.

Like the United States, France has long welcomed immigrants but makes few concessions to identity politics or multiculturalism. Assimilation in France has always required shedding one’s immigrant identity for Frenchness, and it is this very process that proponents of the head scarf ban think it will promote.

It is not accidental, however, that in France this debate about the nature and extent of Muslim integration is taking place on the site of the school. Some of the reasons are obvious. French educational policy is determined by the central government; spending on education comprises a large part of the French national budget; and teachers’ unions are powerful. Furthermore, the French still believe deeply in the school as an institution that can mold individual beliefs and shape societal values.

But most importantly, the head scarf debate taps into one of the most powerful founding myths of the French Republic: the school as the cradle of democratic unity. Although many commentators point to the French Revolution as the period that gave birth to civic and secular identity in France, the sustained – and victorious – battle over religious influence actually took place a century later. In the 1880s, when a stable French democracy took root, the government sought to supplant the Catholic church in providing education to French children. Religion was removed from the the public-school curriculum and religious teachers from public-school classrooms. This “school war” was thought necessary in order to lessen the political and social influence of the church, which republicans saw as a threat to democracy itself. They worried particularly about the power that “monarchical” priests seemed to have over women – a claim that was used to justify denying French women the vote until 1944.

It is striking how the language and arguments in favor of the head scarf ban echo those of this pivotal period in French history. All invoke the idea of laïcité or secularism in the school as of fundamental importance to the very survival of French democracy. They present the growth of Muslim influence in France today as a revival of the perceived Catholic threat to the nation a century ago. The girls who wear head scarves, like Catholic women at the turn of the century, are seen as mere pawns in the hands of a fanatical clergy.

The invocatory power of these apparent historical parallels explains why the debate about Muslim assimilation in France is being held over what might appear to outsiders as a minor issue: what adolescent girls wear to school. In an ironic historical twist, some devout Muslim families have chosen to send their daughters to private Catholic schools, which do not enforce the ban. And Muslim opponents to the ban, like many Catholics one hundred years ago, evoke the French tradition of liberty itself to support the right to wear head scarves to school.

Although the secular idea of the school has its origins on the left, over a century later, the majority of the French non-Muslim public, as well as the center-right government of Jacques Chirac, have adopted rhetoric and assumptions that were hotly contested in the past and support the ban as the necessary precondition to Muslim assimilation and national unity. As in the past, the school is perceived as the front line in a “culture war” that threatens to divide the nation.

All countries have founding myths that can preclude serious consideration of important issues. (The right to bear arms in the United States jumps to mind.) But the French might be well served by questioning both the historical basis of this particular myth and its applicability to the present situation. Historians no longer believe that the Catholic schools of the late nineteenth century were the threat to the Republic that politicians of the era – and generations of French citizens ever since – thought they were. The “school war” never targeted the clothing of schoolchildren. It was instead directed against Catholic curriculum and teachers, arguably more influential ways of delivering religious propaganda. And at the time the Catholic church did indeed administer and staff large numbers of schools, which has no parallel in the current situation. In fact, the head scarf ban may create a system of Muslim schools that does not yet exist, further isolating Muslim girls from contemporary French society. Finally, focusing attention on what children wear to school distracts from the discussion of serious inequities in jobs, housing, and educational opportunities that Muslim immigrants face in France, and on the gender inequities within the Muslim community itself. By displacing the problem of integration onto the school the French are privileging a century-old argument over present reality.