The French "Law Against the Veil"

Every year for the past for four years (this year will be the fifth), I have organized a lecture series, made up of three presentations made by local scholars – and also one from my institution (because it's a free speaker!) – focusing on the contemporary cultures of countries whose language we teach, i.e. French, German, Russian (offered via ITV courses), and Spanish.

This year, I invited a scholar from Pittsburgh who will be giving a talk on France’s so-called “law against the veil” on March 22. I had obtained a smallish university grant to fund my lecture series, which I always run on a shoestring, and asked the Women’s Commission to grant me another $50.00 toward the speaker’s honorarium. One of my colleagues and friends, who is on the Women’s Commission Committee that grants such funds, talked to me about the veil issue a bit, telling me that he had just read an article on this matter in the November 22 issue of The New Yorker magazine, which he left in my mailbox yesterday morning.

Last night, in spite of a violent headache after a tough day, I read this article, written by Jane Kramer, a journalist about whom I know absolutely nothing. But hers was a well-researched and well-written article, on a topic about which I am afraid I am not overly knowledgeable, and basically have not really been able to form a solid opinion – because I just don’t know enough about the issues at stake. Although, I must say that, after having read a few articles about it, I am on the side of the “law against the veil” (Article L. 141-5-1 of Law No. 2004-228 of the national Code d’Éducation), which reads as follows:*

Dans les écoles, les collèges et les lycées publics, le port de signes ou tenues par lesquels les élèves manifestent ostensiblement une appartenance religieuse est interdit.
Le règlement intérieur rappelle que la mise en oeuvre d'une procédure disciplinaire est précédée d'un dialogue avec l'élève.

[In public elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools, it is forgidden to wear symbols or clothes through which students conspicuously display their religious affiliation.
Internal rules require that a dialogue with the student precede the enforcement of any disciplinary procedure.]

Now, of course, it has often been pointed out that this law applies as well to the wearing of a yamakas or larger Christian crosses. But it is obvious that it was enacted in response to the growing number of female students showing up in public schools wearing the shador, or Muslim veil. 10% of France’s population is Muslim – most of it of North African origin, the result of some post-colonial mayhem. With the alienation of the Muslim population and its relegation to suburban ghettos riddled with unemployment rates as high as 60%, a resurgence of fundamentalist Islam has occurred over the past ten years in France. And one dimension of the impact of this movement, whereby a disenfranchised Muslim population shifts its allegiance from the government to its religion, is that “many young women seem to be capitulating to Islamist pressure,” as Jane Kramer remarks in a New Yorker online interview. Kramer adds: “When you see a twelve-year-old girl coming to school in a chador, where for two or three generations no one had worn one, you have to look at this as the expression of an enormous pressure from the men in the girl’s family. You’re really dealing with a born-again movement, and the girls get the short end of the stick.” So this matter is also an important feminist issue, and it is not to be left unnoticed that, in her New Yorker article, Jane Kramer also mentions the problem of female genital mutilation, which is prevalent among fundamentalist Muslims.

Does the French state want to act as the protector of those young women from their family’s religion? The subtext of the "LOI n° 2004-228 du 15 mars 2004 encadrant, en application du principe de laïcité, le port de signes ou de tenues manifestant une appartenance religieuse dans les écoles, collèges et lycées publics" [LAW n° 2004-228 of 15 March 2004, in application of the principle of secularism, addressing the wearing of signs or clothing displaying a religious affiliation in public elementary, middle and high schools"], is that schools are sanctuaries where one is allowed to experience religious freedom which, to quote Ben Greenman in his interview of Jane Kramer, is not only “freedom of religion,” but “freedom from religion.” For the past century, Jane Kramer remarks, the French have not been “preaching secularism so much as removing religion aggressively from the classroom.”

The big question in the end, I believe, is nailed by Kramer in that New Yorker online interview. She asks: “What do you do in a secular state when large numbers of people have begun to demand exception, when they say that significant zones of their lives are covered by Islamic law rather than by French law?” The French government answered that question by reaffirming the power of the secular state.

I would say that all of this is scary, because what we have now in the U.S. is a large number of people who also demand exception, and want to make their exception the law, because “significant zones of their lives” are covered by a fundamentalist Christian doctrine rather than by U.S. law and its Constitution. And change the law and the Constitution is what they want to achieve to make it fit their religious doctrine -- in defiance of that very Constitution's assertion of the separation of Church and State. And our government is responding by denouncing the secular state and becoming a theocracy.

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*Back in 1994, an official memo had been released to all heads of public school establishments by François Bayrou, who was Minister of Education at the time. This memo, known as La Circulaire Bayrou, reaffirmed the “secular ideal” of the French Republic, and declared that “Le port par les élèves de signes discrets, manifestant leur attachement personnel à des convictions notamment religieuses, est admis dans l’établissement. Mais les signes ostentatoires, qui constituent en eux mêmes des éléments de prosélytisme ou de discrimination, sont interdits. » (“the wearing by students of inconspicuous signs indicating their personal attachment mainly to religious convictions is allowed in the building. But ostentatious signs, which constitute in themselves elements of proselytism or discrimination, are forbidden.”)