The liberal secularist values of the Fifth French Republic look set for a collision course with the burgeoning Muslim population, which has been imported mainly from France’s former colonies in the Maghreb region of North Africa.
With surveys suggesting that second and third generations of migrants are becoming more radical in their adherence to the Qur’an as groups like the Muslim Brotherhood take advantage of the emerging parallel societies fostered in ethnic minority enclaves, the issue of assimilation has become more pressing.
One integrationist proposal which appears to be gaining ground is to expand the restrictions on Islamic garb in public. In 2011, the government prohibited full face covering veils such as the burqa or niqab, and now some argue that this should be extended to head coverings such as the hijab.
According to a CSA survey for Le Journal du Dimanche, 69 per cent of French voters would support a ban on the Islamic veil in public. This, the paper noted, was an increase of eight points since 2022, when 61 per cent said that they were in favour of such a move.
Unsurprisingly, supporters of right wing parties such as the populist National Rally and the establishment centre-right Les Républicains were most in favour of a law to bar veils in public, at 82 and 80 per cent respectively. This was followed by supporters of the liberal Macronist coalition, 65 per cent of whom backed a ban.
Overall, 51 per cent of leftist voters also favour a ban, yet, supporters of the hard left Greens or the radical France in Revolt (La France Insoumise/LFI) party of Morocco-born Jean-Luc Mélenchon were both opposed at 65 and 56 per cent.
The survey comes in the wake of a controversy over the presence of several veiled schoolchildren in the gallery of the Palais Bourbon as the National Assembly debated the budget last month. President of the National Assembly and member of Macron’s Renaissance party, Yaël Braun-Pivet, stridently warned that it represented a threat to “republican coherence” and contravened the spirit of the 2004 law mandating secular standards in schools.
“It seems unacceptable to me that young children should be able to wear ostentatious religious signs in the galleries. We had not been confronted with this situation in the past. I have called on everyone to exercise the utmost vigilance so that this does not happen again,” she wrote.
The intervention from the National Assembly president sparked outrage on the left, with figures such as LFI MP Paul Vannier branding her comments “Islamophobic”.
However, there have been growing calls for a ban on schoolchildren being veiled. Indeed, a report last week from the centre-right Les Républicains (LR) in the Senate called for such a ban on headscarves for girls under the age of 16 as a part of a “comprehensive republican rearmament in the face of the Islamist offensive.”
The senators argued that the Islamic veil represented the “banner of sexual apartheid” and is used as “an instrument of social control and territorial marking” to enable “entire territories to experience ghettoization with the creation of parallel societies that escape republican norms.”
Despite the widespread support from the public, President Macron’s neo-liberal government appears to be against any move to ban the veil in public, with recently installed interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, a former police chief who took over from anti-Islamist hardliner Bruno Retailleua amid the latest government shakeup in October, saying that a veil ban would be “stigmatising towards our Muslim compatriots who may feel hurt.”
This puts the government largely in line with the radical left on the issue. Indeed, LFI candidate for mayor of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande, Sasha Bernet, argued last week that the growing prevalence of veils in public marked the success of assimilation into French society.
The self-identified transgender activist said per Le Figaro: “People who wear the veil today in France, it’s a sign of integration into French society. Because the first generations who arrived in France didn’t dare wear it. They were afraid of how others would see them… Young women who wear the veil feel safe, feel at home, they can wear the veil with complete peace of mind.”
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