The French Burkini story explained to my American Friends
I’m a French journalist at Le Monde, in Paris, and a 2015 Fellow at the Nieman Foundation in the United States. Last year, I wrote this article to help my American friends get a sense of what was happening in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo attack. I thought I’d try to do something similar to help American readers have a better understanding of what has been happening in France in the last weeks.
What the hell is happening with France? You may have seen in the American media pictures of women wearing a headscarf on the beach being confronted by armed police. Or you may have heard stories about how France was going berserk about the so-called “Burkini” — a full-body swimsuit for women that is designed to be “in line with Islamic values”.
1 — What exactly happened — and why?
The story started in Marseille, in the South of France: A Muslim women’s group rented an aquatic park for a day in July in order to organize an event only for women and children. Women attending would be allowed to wear swimsuits covering their body from the chest to the knees, but not bikinis. Local politicians said that this event was a shame because it excluded women in bikinis and men in general. After a few days of controversy, the event was cancelled.
Then, the mayor of Cannes — yes, the city of the famous Film Festival — banned the burkini on the city’s beaches claiming the swimwear would cause “public disorder.” In a few days, 31 cities, most of them on the French Riviera, passed similar bans.
Most French politicians supported the mayors. The Prime minister, a socialist, said that “beaches, like any public space, need to be safe from religious demands. The burkini is not a new fashion, it’s the political reflection of a counter-society, based on the enslaving of women”.
You might have seen what happened next: Several women who were not even wearing a burkini or going into the sea were fined on the beaches for being veiled or fully clothed, leading to a global outcry about France becoming a racist country.
Civil liberties groups sued. They lost before a local judge in Nice, but they appealed to the Conseil d’Etat (which is like the supreme court for administrative justice) and they won. The municipal ordinances are no longer valid.
2 — Why is all this fuss happening now — and why in the South of France?
France has a long history of uneasiness with Islam and the veil. But it’s been even stronger since the terrorist attacks in France in the last two years..
After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, there was some solidarity among the French population, with calls to avoid any equating of Islam with terrorism. This changed after 130 people were killed in Paris last November and 86 people in Nice in July, including 10 children.
Although some of the victims of the attacks were French muslims, a lot of French people see all Muslims in France as alien and separate. Suspicion against French muslims is ubiquitous.
In the South of France, the terrorist attacks led people to be even more anti-muslim than they already were. Nice, Cannes and the surrounding region are not exactly well known for their tolerance.
Many Americans know Provence and the French Riviera as some of the most beautiful places in the world, and I couldn’t agree more. The South of France has also always been a land of immigration — a mix of Mediterranean cultures from Spain and Morocco to the Middle-East. While a lot of people who live in this area are the sons and daughters of immigrants, it is also one of the strongholds of the racist far-right. Marine Le Pen’s National Front party very often comes first in local elections. And the conservative party — called Les Républicains (The Republicans) — in this area is sometimes just as radical. The two parties are competing for a very (very, very) conservative constituency.
The burkini story is part of this competition: Who can boast the more anti-Islam, anti-immigrant platform? To make matters worse, there is a presidential election next April in France. And with the complete failure of the Socialist President François Hollande, the battle for the presidency will very likely be between the conservative Républicains and the National Front.
3- Who are these people who are against Islam? Are they all Trump-like extremists? What do they want?
I would love things to be that simple, but they’re not…sorry. The people who campaigned against the burkini are not only right-wing mayors and far-right activists.
The unease with Islam in France is also led by some sectors of the left, including Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Valls recently said that Marianne (the woman who is the symbol of the French Republic) is topless and not veiled, and that this is why she is the symbol of freedom.
“Her breasts are exposed because she’s feeding the people; she isn’t wearing a veil because she’s free”
Valls actually represents the French left-wing tradition of laïcité, a concept I will explain a few paragraphs later. Just keep in mind that this political tradition — the idea of a strong separation between the state and religion — goes back to the French Revolution. The French Socialists, the teachers unions, some feminist groups and newspapers like Charlie Hebdo have been fighting for years against the Catholic Church and its conservatism.
For them, denouncing the islamic headscarf is the same thing: fighting religious oppression in the strong belief that wearing the veil is never a choice for a woman.
As sincere as they might be, this is leading to a strange anti-muslim coalition: You can find feminist liberal activists and far-right representatives standing together against the visibility of Islam in the streets.
Which is strange, when you think about it, because they are otherwise opposed in everything: Same-sex marriage, for instance, the left legalized same-sex marriage in Parliament in 2013 while hundreds of thousands of conservatives rallied against it.
Yet they are almost all united in the view that the headscarf is bad. In 2010, when Ilham Moussaïd, a woman wearing a headscarf, wanted to be a candidate in local elections for a tiny far-left organization, the outcry was such that all the political parties, including her own, denounced it as anti-Republican.
4 — Ok, so the headscarf is banned in France, right ?
Well, actually, it’s not. Among the 5 million muslims in France, few women actually wear the veil, but it does exist. People who are frustrated with the veil will say that more and more women wear it nowadays, but there is no official data to back this up.
So the veil is not illegal, right? Expect exceptions. Since 2004, it has been illegal for students and teachers to wear the veil in high school. The law stipulates that any conspicuous religious signs are forbidden at public schools — in France, 85 % of the kids go to public schools.
“In theory, the law applies to all religions, so that the wearing of big crosses by Christian students is also not allowed, but the truth is that the law was clearly aimed at the veil and is mostly enforced against Muslims. The law was passed in the Parliament both by liberal left-wing and conservative parties. Some students have been excluded from their schools because they wanted to keep their scarf or veil, and they had to go to religious private schools.
In 2010, the French Parliament voted for a law banning full-face veils from the streets or any public space. Again, to avoid being deemed unconstitutional by the French equivalent of the Supreme Court, the law doesn’t mention the veil itself but the fact of hiding your face. A woman wearing a burqa or a niqab in the street can be asked by a police officer to take it off, and to pay a fine up to 150 dollars. About 250 tickets are issued every year, according to the French minister of interior, most of them to the same handful of women.
Apart from the law, there have been tons of controversies about moms wearing the veil while going on field trips with schools (not clear if it’s legal or not), women wearing the veil at work while working with children or the fact that the headscarf is forbidden in high schools but not in colleges (a lot of politicians actually support a ban in colleges too).
These laws are all passed under the concept of laïcité, which has governed the separation of state and religion in France since 1905.
5 — What is this laïcité thing again?
This is the word we use to describe the separation of religion and state, which might sound familiar to Americans but is in fact VERY different. There is no equivalent word in English.
The French Political scientist Olivier Roy tried to explain this difference a few years ago :
“It is not easy to explain the French notion of laïcité to Americans, not because it is entirely foreign to the American experience, but because it is close enough to it to give Americans exactly the wrong idea. Laïcité is about the separation of church and state, a concept Americans know well. But in America, separation was designed to free religion from state interference (and vice versa), whereas in France separation evolved to exclude religion from public space and to promote the supremacy of the state over religious organizations. And the historical reasons for the distinction are clear enough. As de Tocqueville observed, the American Founders saw Protestant Christian religion as a support for freedom and civic virtue; French republicans saw the Catholic Church as having been complicit with the worst features of the ancien régime and sought to limit its sway over French democracy.”
Religion in France and in the U.S. are also different. You would never have a church in a college in France, or or a polling station in a church in Paris. This situation may be shocking for Americans — but, as Olivier Roy puts it, Laïcité is at the heart of what the French Republic actually is.
Laïcité used to be a very liberal concept. For years it has been championed by teachers, unions and the Socialist party. But recently, after 9/11 and the rise of a strong Islamophobia in France, Laïcité has been (mis)used to specifically limit the presence of Islam in public spaces. Therefore, this notion is now also championed by Marine Le Pen and the National Front in their anti-Islam political platform.
Everything in France nowadays is seen through to the prism of Laïcité: there have been controversies about a fast-food restaurant who wanted to sell only halal meat, about the construction of mosques in many cities in France, or about anything related to being a Muslim in the country of laïcité — now even what women should wear at the beach.
Most of these controversies are ridiculously fueled by the far right. They also make clear the fact that the concept of laïcite was originally created and developed with Christianity and the Catholic Church in mind, not other religions. Now that there are 5 million Muslims in France, they want to practice their religion the way they think is right. And the French laïcité doesn’t know how to answer those questions.
Thanks for reading, if you have any comments or question, you can reach me @nabilwakim on Twitter
