IN late July 2016, David Lisnard, the mayor of Cannes, France issued an ordinance banning the wearing of burkinis – modest swimwear whose name is coined from burqa and bikini – on public beaches in his city. Some 29 French mayors of coastal towns followed suit. The French burkini bans followed a 2004 French law banning headscarves and other ‘conspicuous religious symbols’ in schools, a 2010 law banning full-face veils in public places, a 2015 attempt to regulate students’ skirt lengths (they should not be too long) in public schools, and calls by some French politicians to ban headscarves in French universities.

With the burkini bans, France’s obsession with regulating Muslim women’s dress took, in the view of much of the non-French world, its most farcical turn. When photographs of a woman apparently being forced by armed police standing over her to remove excess clothing on a beach on the French Riviera went viral on social media and in the press in August 2016, many thought the French had lost their marbles.

The burkini bans and the heated defence they aroused among French politicians and opinion leaders are symptoms of national hysteria. Recent terrorist attacks have set a country already in the throws of an identity crisis on the edge of a collective psychological meltdown. Majoritarian nationalism is in full-throttle resurgence in France, and the country’s Muslim minority is increasingly stigmatized as the source of the country’s woes, from the terrorism threat to declining social services to high unemployment to a perception of rising crime and lawlessness. Against the backdrop of these insecurities, visibly Muslim residents are increasingly treated as an existential threat. Politicians on the right, including former French president Nicolas Sarkozy of Les Républicains party and Marine Le Pen of the far right populist National Front party, have raised the Muslim and immigrant bogeyman to whip up outraged voter support in advance of presidential elections in 2017.

 

The problem is France’s secularism, or laïcité in its 1905 legal definition, which bans the presence of religious signs in public space. Originally meant to curb the power of the Catholic Church over French civic life, the 1905 law was immediately used to ban clerical robes worn by Catholic priests, and those who defied the ban were arrested. The point is that religious affiliation or belief is a purely private affair, and must remain invisible in the French public sphere.

Of course, it is impossible to separate out attempts to regulate Muslim women’s dress in the name of defending laïcité from the legacy of France’s colonial past, the history of immigration from its former colonies – especially from Algeria and the rest of the Maghreb – pervasive discrimination against immigrants and their French-born children, the rise of global Islamism and the emergence of the Islamic State, and the impact of globalization and economic crisis on French society. In this perfect storm, France’s Muslims in general, and French Muslim women in particular, have become scapegoats on which a host of fears and insecurities are pinned. In the wake of a series of horrific terrorist attacks, those fears fastened onto the burkini in July and August 2016. Thierry Migoule, an official in the Cannes municipal government defended his city’s ban on the burkini, saying it was ‘clothing that conveys an allegiance to the terrorist movements that are waging war against us.’

 

That the burkini became an overloaded signifier is evident in the reasons French mayors gave to justify the bans. Variously, these included (i) a threat to public order (the mere sight of a woman wearing a burkini would be enough to spark mob violence by aggrieved and angry French citizens); (ii) a problem of hygiene (the French are particularly finicky about what type of swimwear can be worn in public swimming pools – swimming trunks for men, for example, are banned and only Speedo-style form-hugging suits are allowed presumably for reasons of hygiene – though how the hygiene of swimwear is relevant to beach going and swimming in the sea is puzzling); (iii) water safety (voluminous garments could make it easy for a woman to drown and endanger lifeguards who might come to her rescue – on this ground several towns also banned women wearing saris from beaches); (iv) morality, on the grounds that the burkini flouts good civic conduct by challenging the principle of laïcité and French women’s right to be free, a right women express at the beach by appearing barely clothed.

Not to be undone by politicians on the right clamouring for the burkini ban to be made national, Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the burkini a symptom of the ‘enslavement of women’ that was ‘not compatible with the values of France.’ He thundered in a speech at a government rally on 29 August: ‘Marianne,’ referring to the female symbol of the French republic, ‘has a naked breast because she is feeding the people! She is not veiled, because she is free! That is the republic!’ France’s minister of women’s rights, Laurence Rossignol, declared that the burkini was ‘the beach version of the burqa’ and said ‘it has the same logic: Hide women’s bodies in order to control them.’

The name ‘burkini’ was itself upsetting to many French. The summer of 2016 marked the 60th anniversary of the bikini, created in 1946 by French fashion designer Louis Bréard. In 1953, Brigitte Bardot made the bikini sensational after posing in the skimpy garment on the French Riviera. It is worth recalling that the bikini was initially banned in France, Italy and a number of other countries as an affront to public morality because it was too revealing. But, in the decades after the sexual revolution and women’s liberation, the bikini became a banal form of female beachwear in the West, with women in Europe even dropping the top half to sunbathe and swim topless with no one batting so much as an eye.

 

The idea that the bikini, introduced by blond French sex idol Brigitte Bardot, could get its name mixed up with the burqa – a garment that symbolizes to the French cultural backwardness, oppression and, more recently, Muslim aggression against French secularism – is simply perverse to many French. The cognitive dissonance of the name ‘burkini’ in France can be understood in the context of another recent row in France, the uproar over the idea of ‘Muslim fashion’.

In April 2016, Ms. Rossignol let slip on French television her view that women who wear a burqa voluntarily are like American ‘negroes’ who support slavery. She made this remark while condemning the move of Marks and Spencer, H&M and Dolce and Gabbana to create and market fashion aimed at Muslim women. Fashion is one of France’s leading industries, a domain of national pride and considerable national export revenue. The idea of ‘Muslim fashion’ conveys the same kind of contradiction, the same cognitive dissonance as ‘burkini’ to many French.

One factor in France’s burkini hysteria was certainly profound psychosocial trauma. On 14 July 2016, a 31 year old Franco-Tunisian man named Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel plowed a 19 ton refrigerated truck through crowds gathered along the seaside promenade in Nice to watch the traditional Bastille Day fireworks. By the time Bouhlel was shot dead by police, he had killed some 84 people, and injured scores more, including many children. The images of bodies lying pell-mell on the pavement of Nice’s scenic Promenade des Anglais on the summer evening of France’s national holiday were, understandably, deeply shocking.

The Islamic State claimed Lahouaiej had acted in response to its call for Muslims to attack ‘disbelievers’, including Americans and Europeans and, especially, the ‘spiteful and filthy French.’ But, like all acts of mass terrorist violence, the Nice attacker indiscriminately mowed down men, women and children regardless of their faith, including members of local Muslim families out enjoying the Bastille Day fireworks like everyone else.

 

The trauma of the Nice attack was amplified by the terrorist attacks that had preceded it, including the attack on the magazine staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and on patrons of a kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and a series of attacks on concert-goers and bar and restaurant patrons in Paris in November 2015. And that trauma was reinforced a mere twelve days after the Nice attack when two men entered a church in the Normandy town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray on July 26, and forced the 84 year old priest conducting mass to his knees before slitting his throat and filming themselves speaking in Arabic near the altar. Another parishioner was also attacked. The attackers, both 19 years old, were French citizens. One, Adel Kermiche, had previously attempted to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State. He had been identified by French authorities as a terrorism risk and was under partial house arrest at the time of the crime. Again, the Islamic State claimed the two young men had acted on its behalf.

 

So it was that the burkini, invented by Australian designer Aheda Zanetti to liberate conservative Muslim women by allowing them to participate in beach culture and to swim without hindrance in a garment that respected their desire for modesty, appeared to the French to be ‘a provocation’ – not a sexual provocation, as the bikini was once considered, but a political provocation.

For the French, the very novelty of the garment was proof of this: We never used to see women in burkinis, went the argument on television talk shows and in the press, and if we see them now it’s because radicalized Islamist women are deliberately pushing the limits of what they can wear in public to force their reactionary Muslim identity on the rest of us as a direct challenge to secularism, to women’s liberation and to the values that define the French nation. ‘You watch,’ the mayor of the town of Pantin where I live, Bertrand Kern, told me, ‘there’ll be more burkinis next summer. They will keep at it until they get separate beaches or swimming time for women.’

It is true that Islamist imams, many Salafists, have been preaching a radically conservative version of Islam in France with some success. More Muslim women, especially young women, are wearing headscarves and dressing modestly than before. Partly this is the result of peer pressure in neighbourhoods where Salafist ideology has taken hold, partly it reflects a globalized Islam gaining ground among Muslims in the West, and partly it is an act of rebellion by young Muslim women who, like their male counterparts, are part of a stigmatized and marginalized population that has never been accepted as fully French and to whom a globalized, Salafist Islam – and in the most extreme instance, Islamist terrorism of the sort peddled by the Islamic State – offers an ennobling identity French society has failed to offer too many.

 

The 2004 headscarf ban in French public schools was meant to shield young women who were being pressured by Islamized peers to cover their heads even if they didn’t want to do so, and to provide these girls and parents who did not want their daughters to cover their heads a way out by saying: ‘Well, we would do it but it’s against the law.’ The commission whose report led to the 2004 law, however, opposed extending this ban to university campuses or all public space – bans for which right wing politicians in France have long clamoured – because imposing such bans on adults would be a violation of their right to individual liberty, and that, as adults, they do not need the protective hand of the state to temporarily shield them from potential peer pressure as minors may.¹ The burkini bans, aimed at adult women, breached this line between protecting the interests of minors and entrusting adults to make their own decisions regarding personal dress.

In any case, whether as an act of free will or as something imposed on women by peer pressure or by conservative men, the French view Muslim women covering themselves in public as a refutation of modernity, and as a refusal to accept the core idea of the French Enlightenment: the banishment of the darkness of superstition – including religious belief – by the light of triumphant reason. Headscarves, face veils and burkinis represent the failure of France’s ‘civilizing mission’, which cast France’s colonial ventures not as bids to seize territory and exploit resources but as an altruistic effort to spread France’s (superior) culture. The Muslim veil was seen as an especially potent symbol of backwardness during the French colonial era, whereas women’s unveiling was a sign of their liberation and of their accession to modernity thanks to the enlightened values brought to them by the French.

 

To wear a burkini is seen, therefore, not only as a refusal to be modern but as a refusal to be French. This is why the heated public debate in France on the burkini bans often veered into a rejection of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ multiculturalism. The French see any group that clings to its difference – of food, dress, religion that isn’t hidden from public view – as a symptom of communautarisme, communitarianism. Under France’s assimilationist imperative, immigrant others are welcome only in so far as they are ‘not visibly not French’. This imposes an impossibility on many immigrants and their descendants in France, especially on Muslims or immigrants who hail from Muslim majority countries in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.

A 2012 study by the Migration Policy Institute pointed out that France’s ‘assimilationist requirements create more stigmatization of ethnic minorities and undermine integration prospects. The key parameter for integration is the willingness of the majority to accept "newcomers" into the fabric of society. The French anti-multiculturalism discourse creates the condition for the rejection of plural belongings for the mainstream society, and thus a marginalization of visible minorities.’ ²

 

France’s assimilationist notion of citizenship is grounded in the notion of the nation state outlined in Ernest Renan’s Discours sur la Nation (1882) as a set of common norms and values tied to the sharing of memory, history, sentiments, and attitudes that define a national body. Though France allows dual nationalities, it does not permit hyphenated identities. One cannot be French-Moroccan or a ‘French Muslim’. The politically correct way to refer to Muslims in France is ‘French citizens of Muslim faith.’

But many immigrants and their descendants find themselves in an impossible double bind where, no matter what they do to assimilate, they are never accepted by the French as fully French. From the 2012 report by the Migration Policy Institute: ‘The feeling of having one’s Frenchness denied clearly follows a "line of visibility" affecting primarily immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants, then immigrants and descendants from North Africa, Turkey, and Southeast Asia. The pattern is completely different for immigrants from Europe, who feel accepted in the national community. This acceptance is even more marked among their French-born descendants. Clearly, "Frenchness" is not attributed on the basis of codes, such as the language spoken, but rather on a restricted vision of who "looks French".’³

This helps us understand that, for the French, wearing a burkini on the beach is to visibly flout that one is Muslim. To refuse to ‘look French’ is the real ‘provocation’. The uproar over the burkini betrays a deep insecurity in France over national identity. Many French feel France’s civilizational superiority – an article of faith in France at least since the French Enlightenment – is under attack.

 

The French do not see that the coercive nature of banning Muslim women in France from wearing modest bathing suits and headscarves is the flip side of imposing headscarves and burqas on women in many Muslim countries. Where Saudi Arabia or the Islamic State forces women to wear burqas, France forces women to uncover. Both are forms of domination and control.

Women in towns recently taken back from the Islamic State in Iraq throw off their burqas in a jubilant sign of their liberation from cruel oppressors. Some Muslim women in France wear headscarves, some high school girls come to school in long skirts, and perhaps some women wore burkinis this summer as a political act in defiance of the rules of the state and the social norms that define a Frenchness that, in any case, is denied to them. But other Muslim women in France simply believe some form of modest covering is an expression of their faith, and for these, the burkini is embraced as a liberating garment that makes it possible for them, at last, to enjoy swimming and the beach while respecting modesty they will not relinquish.

On 26 August 2016, France’s Conseil d’État, or Council of State, ruled against a burkini ban in the town of Villeneuve-Loubet after France’s Human Rights League (LDH) and anti-Islamophobia association (CCIF) challenged its legality. The mayor of the town had claimed the ban was necessary to fulfil his duty to protect public order, and that the mere sight of a visibly Muslim woman covering too much of her body could set off violent reactions among the public. The court rejected that argument, citing no evidence of a risk of such violence.

 

In its ruling, the court said the burkini ban ‘seriously and clearly breached fundamental freedoms.’ The ruling immediately prompted French politicians from former president Nicolas Sarkozy on the right to current Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls to call for a change in France’s constitution to allow the burkini to be legally banned, though how this would work in the context of European law, which only admits the threat to public order as a basis for a ban on religious signs, is not clear. But then France’s new nationalists either advocate pulling out of the European Union altogether (the National Front) or reforming the European Union in order to allow far greater national control over border security, immigration and laws regulating public behaviour (Les Républicains).

On 27 November 2016, François Fillon, who was prime minister in the government of led by Nicolas Sarkozy between 2007 and 2012, was elected the centre-right Les Républicains candidate to run for president of France in 2017. Fillon won by 67 per cent of the vote against the more socially moderate Alain Juppé. With Socialist President François Hollande having announced that he will not run for re-election and the French left disunited, Fillon is expected to handily beat Marine Le Pen – whose political fortunes have risen sharply – of the far-right National Front party in presidential elections in the spring of 2017. Among promises that bode ill for healing divisions between France’s white, culturally Christian majority and its Muslim minority, Fillon has vowed to crack down hard on Islam and on immigration. In his victory speech on 27 November, he warned immigrants and residents in France of foreign origin: ‘When you arrive in someone else’s house, out of courtesy, you don’t make the rules.’ The message is clear: France’s others, no matter how many generations they may be settled in France, are mere guests in the master’s house. Fillon is adamant that France is not and never will be a multi-cultural society. He promises to change France’s national curriculum to inculcate pride in France’s past, notably in its colonial period when, according to Fillon, France generously shared its culture.

 

Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris in January 2015, waged by French citizens of immigrant origin in the name of the Islamic State, Prime Minister Manuel Valls acknowledged social divisions in France were so deep that a ‘territorial, social, ethnic apartheid has spread across our country.’ Unfortunately, France’s white, culturally Christian majority seems determined to enforce this apartheid, relegating visible minorities to a pariah status. The country whose motto is ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ would rather Muslim women who don’t wish to expose their bodies in public stay home than allow them to join their fellow citizens at the beach in swimwear no more covering, and far less cumbersome, than the wet suits worn by surfers and scuba divers. But being covered is not the problem with the burkini. The problem is it identifies the wearer as Muslim, and being visibly Muslim is increasingly seen in France as an intolerable affront to French identity.

 

*A version of this paper was presented at the Reset Dialogues on Civilizations seminar on ‘Identity and Democracy in the Age of Fear’ held in Venice, Italy, 12-14 October 2016.

Footnotes:

1. See this first person account of the commission and its deliberations on the headscarf ban by Patrick Weil at http://www.patrick-weil.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2005-Lever-le-voile-Revue-Esprit..pdf

2. Patrick Simon, ‘French National Identity and Integration: Who Belongs to the National Community? Migration Policy Institute, 2012, p. 1. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/TCM-french-national-identity

3. Ibid., p. 13.