French Senate votes to ban women from wearing hijabs on school trips
▶ Divisions over secularism in France have been pushed into the public eye
France’s divisions over its secular identity and Islam were exposed when the French Senate backed a bill to ban Muslim mothers from wearing headscarves while accompanying children on school trips.
Tuesday’s debate split parliament, with President Emmanuel Macron’s government arguing against the bill.
His party’s dominance in France’s National Assembly means the ban is unlikely to become law.
The vote comes after Julien Odoul of the far-right National Rally party this month demanded that a Muslim woman remove her hijab “in the name of our secular principles” when she accompanied her son on a school trip to a regional council meeting.
The woman said her son was upset by the incident.
“What he told me when he was crying is that he felt everyone was against me,” the woman told the Collective Against Islamophobia in France.
“I felt a rejection I’ve never felt before. Today, I have a negative opinion of what is called the republic.
“They destroyed all the work I was doing indirectly with this class, in which children of immigrant roots often had an attitude of thinking France was against them.”
Marine Le Pen, the far-right figurehead of National Rally, described the veil as an “ideological marker”, a “political weapon” and “an infraction of secularism”.
Headscarves are a source of debate in France and in 2011 it became the first European country to ban face veils.
France banned religious symbols in schools in 2004, a decision based on laws aimed at equality for all beliefs, which received broad public support.
But the law did not extend to school trips, despite presidential advice to continue the ban beyond school grounds, and education leaders are divided about whether to enforce it.
“Is a school outing educational time? Yes. Whoever accompanies a class is therefore in public service and cannot wear distinctive signs,” Republican Party senator Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio said during Tuesday’s debate.
Socialist senator Samia Ghali, whose parents are Algerian, said the bill was not appropriate because it stigmatised Muslim women, but the senate backed the first reading of the bill by 163 to 114.
The debate came at a sensitive time after a man, 84, with links to the country’s far-right was arrested on a charge of shooting two men outside a mosque in south-west France on Monday.
The man told investigators he wanted “to avenge the destruction of Notre-Dame”, which was ravaged by fire in April.
Mr Odoul was among the French political figures to condemn the attack on the men, aged 74 and 78.
Mr Odoul said France must be “ruthless with all those who sow violence”.
Mr Macron promised that those responsible would be brought to justice.
“The republic will not tolerate hatred. Everything will be done to protect our compatriots of the Muslim faith,” he said.