People & Histories
1989–2020

Laïcité, the headscarf and terror

From the 1989 headscarf affair to the 2004 school law and the attacks of 2015, the place of Islam in a secular republic becomes one of France's defining debates.

Well established religionidentitypoliticsconflict

In 1989 three schoolgirls in Creil were excluded for wearing Islamic headscarves, opening a debate that never closed. A law of 15 March 2004 banned conspicuous religious symbols, including headscarves, kippahs and large crosses, in state schools, and a 2010 law banned face coverings in public spaces. Supporters saw both as defending equality and neutrality; critics, including some scholars of laïcité such as Jean Baubérot, saw a shift from a neutral state to demands on citizens.

  • Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)
  • The Politics of the Veil — Joan Wallach Scott, Princeton University Press (2007)

Islam is the second religion in France: in a large 2019–20 survey of adults aged 18 to 59, about 10% said they were Muslim, 29% Catholic and 51% said they had no religion.

Then came terror. On 7 January 2015 gunmen killed twelve people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and an attack on a kosher supermarket followed; millions marched under the slogan “Je suis Charlie”. On 13 November 2015, attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, café terraces and the national stadium killed 130 people. In 2016 a truck attack in Nice killed 86, and in October 2020 a teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded after showing cartoons of the Prophet in a class on free speech.

  • France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)

How it's seen
Defenders of a strict laïcité

Public schools must be a space free of religious pressure, especially on girls; the Republic protects individuals from communities, and blasphemy is a freedom, not a crime. Teachers like Samuel Paty died defending these values.

  • Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)

Many French Muslims and critics

The 1905 law was meant to make the state neutral, not to police citizens' clothing. Rules aimed at headscarves and abayas single out Muslims, especially women, and feed a sense that Islam is treated as foreign to France.

  • The Politics of the Veil — Joan Wallach Scott, Princeton University Press (2007)
  • Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)

Why it matters today

France

Laïcité is close to a civic religion: a promise that the state is neutral and that everyone is free to believe or not. But French people disagree sharply over what it demands of citizens, especially Muslim women, and the jihadist attacks of 2015–2020 made the stakes feel existential. The right to mock religion, as Charlie Hebdo does, is for many French people a non-negotiable part of freedom; for others it is a cover for targeting Muslims.