Nadia was just a teenager when she was suspended from her secondary school. In the eyes of the law, she was guilty of an affront to public order. Her disruption? Nadia wore a hijab.
Nadia is the pseudonym used to protect the identity of one of the many Muslim-identifying schoolgirls interviewed in a study by Stanford political scientists Aala Abdelgadir and Vasiliki Fouka. Contemporary secularism in France has been a complex and volatile issue for decades, hence the scholars’ examination of the 2004 French law banning religious clothing in schools and its discriminatory impacts on Muslim women. In 2025, however, Islamophobic rhetoric under the guise of secularism took a swing towards the extreme.
In December 2025, Renaissance, a centrist party led by former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, proposed a bill to ban minors from wearing veils in public, known as loi n° 2167. How can a government that “ensures the equality before the law of all of its citizens, without distinction as to origin, race, or religion” conceive of such a policy? It all comes back to a fundamental philosophy in the French Republic, la Laïcité.
The Foundation: Laïcité
Professor Laurent Mayali, a Faculty Director at UC Berkeley Law School and a French native, gives insight into the historical essence of Laïcité. Article I of the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic states that “France is an indivisible, secular [laïc], democratic, and social republic.” The notion of a “laïc” republic produced the 1905 law regarding Laicite, which grants that “[n]o one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established public order,” and affirms that the state neither recognizes nor finances any religion/religious group. Mayali emphasized the “deeper cultural meaning, closely associated with the identity of the French Republic,” of Laïcité, as “more than an institutional form of relationship between the states and religion. It’s also the expression of a unique identity.”
This distinctive nature finds roots in French cultural movements predating any concrete secular law. According to Mayali, the 1905 law came at the end of a “strong wave of anti-clericalism against the church, and a fight, also at that time, for the control of education.” At the end of the 19th century, schools were the center of the cultural struggle for intellectual freedom and for policies separate from the church.
Hence, it’s “essential to the French republic to be essentially anti-clerical, but at the same time, to show tolerance, because there is in the law what they call liberte de culte (religious freedom),” contextualizing the complex duality of secular philosophy in France today.
Also key to understanding the contemporary landscape is the relative interpretation of equal rights and freedom of expression in France and the United States. Both France and the United States grant equal rights and freedom of belief to their citizens. However, in the US, we conceive “of human rights as subjective rights — that we have rights because we exist,” in France, there is “this notion of yes, you have rights, but in a sense they are granted to you by the law. If it goes against the law, that’s not going to be accepted.” From this notion, French law derives the aforementioned clause of “public order.” Given the histories of the respective constitutions, where in the US, citizens have freedom of religion, the anti-clerical movement produced a French freedom from religion. For this reason, Laïcité is tied not only to policy but intrinsically to the Republican identity, to a deeper national spirit.
Contemporary Practice
How has Laïcité become the foundation for Islamophobic political rhetoric? As Mayali observes, “the idea of Laïcité in France, as it has been addressed in the past 20 years, is also a veiled excuse to address other issues in French society.” Namely, it has been repurposed and weaponized by right-wing politicians to support nationalist anti-immigration movements.
In 2004, Loi n° 2004-228, article L. 141-5-1, banned the wearing of clothing “by which pupils conspicuously manifest a religious affiliation” in schools, initiating an influx of legislation disproportionately affecting Muslim-identifying French citizens. In 2008 the burqa and niqab were banned, and, more recently, in 2024 Bill N° 668 proposed banning religious clothing from the sports industry. The proposed December ban, however, revokes the autonomy, specifically of young muslim women, to express their religious freedom.
The 2004 law was passed despite over forty previous rulings by the Council of the State recognizing the right of Muslim schoolgirls to wear the veil as constitutional and consistent with the doctrine of Laïcité. What changed? Growing anti-immigrant, xenophobic sentiment gained national traction in the 2010s, with movements such as “Le Grand Remplacement” seeing pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories of racial superiority on the rise.
As of 2023, an estimated 2,091,600 immigrants from the previously colonized, predominantly Muslim countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were residing in France, according to the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies. An estimated 32.4 percent of all second-generation French citizens are descended from immigrants of these same nations. Regarding the new policy proposals, President Macron claims that, “Laïcité means the neutrality of the State; in no way does it mean the removal of religion from society” and asserts France’s “rules on the subject; we have to enforce them firmly and fairly, everywhere, without compromising.” In the same speech, he warns against Islamic Separatism, “the formation of a counter-society as shown by children being taken out of school, and the development of separate community sporting and cultural activities. Macron rhetorically singles out the containment of a specific religion’s extremist movement as a target of the supposedly neutral, equal policy. Macron’s approach teases a connection between the enforcement of laïc-based policies and the avoidance of Islamic-separatism, not only singling out Islam specifically but implying that by forbidding veiling, the state prevents the isolation and ostracization of Muslim women. According to Abdelgadir and Fouka, however, even the 2004 law doubled the gap between Muslim and Non-Muslim women’s likelihood of finishing secondary education. The policy is therefore measurably alienating, and it cannot stand that Muslim women are protected from isolation when the means entail exclusion from the public sphere.
The controversy around these applications of Laïcité is tired. Gabriel Attal, leader of La Renaissance, appeals to civil rights protection to justify his policy, claiming that veiling “seriously undermines gender equality and the protection of children” and even proposed criminalizing “parental coercion” relating to the practice. Yet even since 2010, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has found France’s banning practices to be violations of citizens’ rights, and has “not [been] persuaded by France’s claim that a ban on face covering was necessary and proportionate from a security standpoint or for attaining the goal of ‘living together’ in society.”
The holes run deeper. Macron’s insistence on “firmly and fairly” faces its own hypocrisy. In the Alsace-Moselle region, the French government funds Catholic and Protestant religious education, an anomaly left from the German occupation of France which remains unrectified by the French government and in contradiction of the 1905 law (Article 2). Robed clergymen are authorized to enter public schools if private counseling is requested by parents or students, despite their religious dress. On a most basic level, the French government nationally observes the religious holidays of Christmas, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, Assumption Day, and All Saints’ Day. This doesn’t reflect the rigidly secular, egalitarian state described by Macron.
As Mayali sees it, “It’s not troubling the public order. Why is it [treated] so? Because wearing a veil is viewed as an act of aggression against the state. When you think about it, it’s almost ridiculous because [veiling] doesn’t threaten anyone. It’s a question of private choices. But for the French State, it isn’t.” The global rise of right-wing extremism is no secret. If and when this policy passes, however, the State attains an unprecedented benchmark of intolerance in the name of an equal society.
In 1945, social theorist Karl Popper presented the paradox of tolerance. In his words, “if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” A society of tolerance, which respects its citizens’ right to spirituality and liberty, cannot simultaneously exclude citizens from civil participation based on their personal religious practice. Disparities in tolerance of religious beliefs by the state, when put into policy, become intolerance, and an intolerant society cannot hope to promise equality of civil participation and of personal liberty to its people.
Under the guise of old philosophy, wealthy Western nations continue to push legislation harming minority populations, and hateful rhetoric grows ever bolder. In the meantime, hundreds more students like Nadia are faced with a choice: forgo the practice of their beliefs, or be stripped of educational opportunity. Assimilation or ostracization. Soon, with loi n° 2167, they may not get a choice at all.
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