The French Republic and Muslim Schoolgirls

The French are yet again in an uproar over the clothes that girls can wear to school. Unlike in the United States, where such controversies might focus on ripped jeans or pajamas, at issue in France are pieces of clothing that supposedly advertise their owners’ religious beliefs, in this case abayas, or the full-length robes favored by some Muslim girls (and women). Gabriel Attal, the ambitious young Education Minister, decided to ban them at the start of the new school year. A government spokesman called them “a political attack, a political sign,” and a means of proselytizing for Islam.

There is nothing particularly new about this controversy. It has been thirty-four years since the first battles over Muslim schoolgirls wearing headscarves in French schools. In 2004 the government passed a sweeping law on the subject. Since then, it has also banned full face coverings in public, several beach towns have tried to outlaw the so-called “burkini” swimsuit, and some right-wing politicians, including Marine Le Pen, have called for further legislation to ban even hijabs in public. Over this long period, the arguments have remained largely static. Defenders of the laws insist that the principle of “laïcité” (roughly, secularism) requires the complete absence of religion, including signs of religious observance, in public spaces, including especially schools. Opponents call the laws violations of human rights and examples of anti-Muslim bigotry. American observers tend towards this latter position. For instance, veteran New York Times reporter Roger Cohen’s story this week on the abaya ban concludes that “in a restive French society, it has been more polarizing than unifying, the declared aim of laïcité.”

As with so many controversies of this sort, the incendiary rhetoric and the endless invocation of abstract principle tends to obscure the actual effects of such legislation. And here, the story is more complicated and more interesting than pieces like Cohen’s suggest. Two decades ago, architects of the headscarf ban in schools, including historian and jurist Patrick Weil, argued (among other things) that it would help free Muslim girls from pressure to conform to stereotypical gender roles, leading to better performance for them in school and increased opportunities in society at large. Interestingly, a recent book by the economist Eric Maurin suggests this may actually be taking place. He argues that since 1994, school performance by Muslim girls has seen what Le Monde summarized as “spectacular, massive, and durable improvement.”

In one sense, this result should not be terribly surprising. For nearly a century and a half, the French school system has functioned as a ruthlessly effective instrument of assimilation, both for successive waves of immigrants, and for France’s own diverse rural populations. While schools in ethnic minority neighborhoods tend to be the most troubled and worst performing in the country, it shouldn’t be assumed that they have entirely failed to produce the intended influence on students (for a nuanced account of what it is like to teach in them, Laurent Cantet’s film “The Class” remains fascinating to watch). Despite all the difficulties faced by what the French call “communities issued from immigration,” over the past few decades, large numbers of people from these communities have moved quietly out of troubled public housing projects, into the middle classes and the mainstream of French life. The project of “republican integration,” of which the headscarf ban has been the most controversial element, has not been the utter failure that it can seem from news reports.

But if the ban may possibly have contributed to improved pedagogical results (and from what I have read, much more research will be needed to confirm Maurin’s hypothesis), that says nothing about its political effects. These, by contrast, have been largely negative—here, I think, Roger Cohen’s assessment is entirely correct. Gabriel Attal, descended from Savoyard nobility on his mother’s side (his father is Jewish), and a graduate of the country’s most prestigious private school, the École Alsacienne, is not exactly well placed to lecture poor Muslim families on what is best for them. Marine Le Pen, the head of a militantly anti-immigrant political party founded by her racist father Jean-Marie, is even less so. Each time “republican” politicians propose yet another law about Muslim dress, a large part of the French Muslim population interprets it, for very understandable reasons, as an attack on them, a sign that they are not welcome in the country. Coming on top of continuing discrimination, police harassment, and the difficulties of life in the worst suburban cités (public housing estates), the laws feed resentment, bitterness and anger. These emotions can easily explode into violence, as they did this summer after the police killing of a young Muslim. Successive governments have argued that the laws help contain Islamist radicalization. More likely, they have encouraged it.

Supporters of the abaya ban (including, according to one poll, 80 percent of French schoolteachers), argue that Muslim girls only started to wear these robes in large numbers recently, in a deliberate attempt to defy the spirit of the 2004 law on headscarves. They suggest that this shift, and the insistence by the girls themselves that the clothing has only cultural, not religious significance, has been coordinated by Islamist militants. (This is another element of the controversy, incidentally, that did not get into Roger Cohen’s Times story). In other words, they insist that the new ban is not actually just a provocation by a hyper-ambitious young minister trying to appeal to xenophobic sentiment.

It is probably too much to expect that French politicians might start seeing the issue in a more nuanced fashion, weighing the possible social and pedagogical effects of new bans against their political effects. Instead, overwhelmingly, as politicians will do, they mostly just repeat well-worn talking points. Which will do nothing whatsoever to help the girls whom the French school system should be preparing for a better life.