How the Head Scarf Became a National Security Threat

Elaine Sciolino, in the NYT (Feb. 8, 2004):

WHO would have thought a piece of cloth could threaten the stability of the French state?...

Still, it is natural that France's government would pick the Islamic veil as a symbol of everything un-French and potentially dangerous about its Muslim population.

Ever since 1789, images and symbols have been used and abused to educate the French people about the republican ideal and the conformity it required.

What better emblem of the nurturing French state could there have been than the engraving of the 1790's titled "Republican France Giving Its Bosom to All of France"? It shows a strong-featured woman with a carpenter's level (symbolizing equality) strategically placed between her exposed and nurturing breasts, and a Gallic rooster sitting on her Phrygian bonnet (a symbol of liberty).

The belief in the republican ideal so permeated the political culture of the 1790's that there were numerous artistic renderings of a fictional woman who chose to blow up herself and her children rather than surrender to counterrevolutionary enemies.

In those days, good revolutionary citizens were forced to wear emblems of the republic. Revolutionaries donned the "cockade," a round red, white and blue ribbon signifying a citizen's liberty; one could be imprisoned for refusing to wear it.

In 1905, a law codified the separation of church and state. But the struggle for a perfect fit between a powerful central republican state and religious practice has never been completely resolved. Nor has official France erased symbols of Catholicism, a pillar of its pre-revolutionary identity.

Seven of the 11 national holidays, including the feast of the Virgin Mary's assumption into heaven and the coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus Christ's disciples, celebrate Catholic events. The Catholic catechism is taught and the crucifix is hung in public schools in Alsace-Lorraine, which is exempt from the 1905 law because the area was still in German hands when it was adopted....

Underscoring the inconsistencies, private Catholic, Jewish and Protestant schools, which would be exempt from the law banning religious symbols, receive state financing. The administrators of the country's first Muslim high school, which opened in Lille last fall, are hoping it, too, will qualify. Some Muslim leaders have pledged to create Muslim schools throughout France, meaning the state could find itself financing schools where the head scarf is the norm.

Even some members of the president's own commission have criticized the recent focus on Muslim head scarves, saying it betrays the spirit of their report, which they had hoped would help unify the country.

"The political response is absurd and laughable," the historian Rene Remond told Le Monde. "It feeds the illusion that all we have to do to solve the problem of integration is to vote through a law."