In France, the law forbidding the Niqab (the full veil, hiding the entire face with the exception of the eyes) was proclaimed on April 11, 2011. Voted in October 2010, it has generated vocal debates within political parties and had been passed by the Parliament without the presence of the majority of the left-wing MPs, who had deserted the premises in protest. A few Socialist, Communist and centrist MPs and Senators did vote for the law, however, including Robert Badinter, who had been the Minister of Justice under François Mitterrand and who had suppressed the death penalty in 1981.
The voting of the law, somewhat paradoxically, seems to have provoked more heated debate and reactions than its actual application. Of course, there was a small demonstration organised in front of the Notre-Dame church by a few “militant” Islamists where a Niqab -wearing woman was arrested. She was actually released a few hours later, without having to pay the “mandatory” €150 fine. But apart from that, no official debate has been launched although there are still some heated exchanges on the French Web.
Why this seeming indifference? Do the French actually agree with the law, or do they just passively accept it as “yet another stupid legislation coming from up above”? The question is rather important, especially since the event seems to have provoked more turmoil in the foreign press. The front page of the International Herald Tribune of April 12 related the aforementioned demonstration with a picture filling almost half the page, The Guardian ran a couple of articles on the subject, and it was also largely commented in the Danish press, the country where I live.
In France, instead of the first fining of another woman in the Paris's suburb Les Mureaux, the stress was more on the Police's surprising statement that in their eyes, the “law was inapplicable” and that they would not harass Niqab -wearing women, unless they were threatening public order. Other than that, almost nothing.
New landscape
The reason for this relative indifference comes, in my view, from the emergence of a new immigration landscape in France that the politicians and the media haven't quite grasped yet. Nicolas Sarkozy's government's openly xenophobic electoral strategy is a complete failure, as all his attempts to mobilise the opinion around “sensitive subjects” such as a debate around the “French identity” in 2009, the expulsion of “illegal” Roma people last summer and once again, a “national debate around Islam and secularism,” ended up as huge flops. His confidence ratings have on the contrary reached an all-time low (29 per cent in the latest Vivavoice-Libération poll on April 11), while Marine Le Pen's Front National has got a mere 10 per cent in last month's local elections. The failure of this xenophobic and populist politics is a sign that France has deeply changed and that the traditional discourses do not work anymore. The greatest part of the urban French population has now been living side by side with immigrants for almost half of a century and have learned to know them, and appreciate them. A local news website created after the November 2009 riots in Bondy ( http://yahoo.bondyblog.fr/ ) is a good site to get a feeling of the true “banlieue”, which I too experienced when I was teaching in Poissy. The “Arabs” and the “Blacks” are not blamed anymore for “taking the Frenchmen's jobs.” Everybody is equally a victim of unemployment; Blacks and Arabs even maybe a little more so, as Orwell would have said.
A fine line
For most French people, as I can gather through surfing the Web's discussion panels and talking to some friends of mine, the law on the Niqab is tackled as a “difficult problem”, splitting even political families. The fine line between a secular Republic and a country that has promised to defend Human Rights is indeed a difficult one to define, and the problem of a law aimed at a minority is not a new one: In 2004, the parliament under Jacques Chirac passed a law forbidding “obvious religious symbols” at school (among which, of course, the Muslim veil, but also the Sikh's turban.) What is new, though, is that this new law and the debate it has provoked are treated as a “specific problem”, and do not extend to a generalisation on “Islam.” Actually, apart from the Front National, a few members of the government, such as Claude Guéant or Patrick Besson and, of course, some Muslim fundamentalists, almost all debaters reject the idea that the Niqab represents Islam's “true nature”.
This failure on Sarkozy's part is therefore quite interesting and challenging, not only for the Conservatives, but also for the Socialists, who are getting ready for the 2012 presidential elections, as it means they will have to tackle a new generation of voters who want to hear less about the “threatening immigrants” and more about the Nation's real problems.
Sébastien Doubinsky is a French writer and visiting lecturer at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
