“Long live sport and so down with the headscarf, of course.” That was how Bruno Retailleau, France's interior minister who has responsibility for religious affairs, addressed the 4,000 people who had gathered at the 'Pour la République' ('For the Republic') rally in Paris on March 26th. The crowd burst into applause. The event was organised by #AgirEnsemble, a pro-Israel lobby that claims to fight “against Islamists who threaten France”, along with a network of think tanks funded by Pierre-Édouard Stérin, the billionaire patron of the far-right.
This is no longer just a drift in the executive's approach regarding the headscarf or hijab, it is a veritable stampede.
Far-right politician Sébastien Chenu has every reason to be pleased. “We want to ensure that the headscarf disappears from our society,” the deputy leader of Rassemblement National (RN) said bluntly on RTL radio on March 23rd, and he even set out the approach that could be taken. “It has to be done step by step, as a matter of principle, to avoid being too harsh,” he declared.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The far-right are filling in the details of how this is to be achieved, too. The plan is to ban the headscarf outright, first in sport, then in “public buildings, government offices, state-run firms, universities”, until, finally, “the street”. But this ban would not include religious symbols such as “Catholic crosses or kippahs”, because “we're waging a war against Islamism”, explained Sébastien Chenu.
Such reasoning has no need for facts. Worse still, some facts are wilfully ignored.
When it comes to sport, Mediapart has just revealed how the only thorough report on the issue of radicalisation in this domain was carefully buried in 2022. Written by the research unit at the Ministry of the Interior, this unpublished document shows there is no radicalisation issue in sport. “The report says what it wants to say,” Senator Michel Savin, the author of a recent Senate bill that would ban the wearing of the headscarf in sports competitions, said dismissively.
Why bother with well-backed research? This is, after all, the Trumpist line already followed by Bruno Retailleau, who in a matter of months has become a veritable machine for making the far-right seem acceptable. Confronted in January 2025 with studies concluding “unanimously that immigration has no impact on crime”, he simply insisted that “reality contradicts this study”.
When the barriers give way
“Down with the headscarf, of course.” The phrase by the interior minister simply slipped out, as if he were stating the obvious. Bruno Retailleau has been preparing the ground ever since he took over running the Ministry of the Interior. On January 7th, the rightwing politician told Le Parisien newspaper that the hijab was “a banner for Islamism, and a sign of women being treated as inferior to men”. Not just the headscarf in sport. Not just the headscarf in schools. The headscarf, full stop.
Former prime minister and current minister for overseas territories Manuel Valls was singing from the same hymn sheet when he recently declared on Europe 1 radio and CNews television news channel that the headscarf was “used as a political banner against the Republic”. Not the headscarf in sport. Not the headscarf in schools. Just the headscarf.
“The headscarf is not desirable in our society,” Jean-Michel Blanquer had declared as long ago as 2019, when he was education minister. But at the time, as the former minister himself says in his book La Citadelle (published by Albin Michel in 2024), this was “not the president’s view”. Blanquer wrote: “In [Emmanuel Macron's] mind, we should not fixate on the Islamic veil, as he believed that doing so risked antagonising the majority of the Muslim population.” On a trip to the French overseas territory of La Réunion, the French head of state indeed made it clear. “What happens in public spaces is not the business of the state or the president of the Republic,” Macron said during that 2019 visit.
In 2022, the president again took a stand against Jean-Michel Blanquer. When rightwing senators put forward a plan to ban the headscarf in sports grounds, the education minister threw his full weight behind the move. Roxana Mărăcineanu, then sports minister, was against it, condemning what she termed the senators’ “obsession”. Emmanuel Macron intervened once more and backed her stance. The Macron camp was still refusing to give way to the siren calls of Islamophobia.
But scroll on fewer than three years later and the barriers have come down. The president, nowhere to be found, has left his new prime minister François Bayrou to decide the matter in favour of the most rightwing faction of his government. This is the same Bayrou who, back in 2004, had abstained from voting on the law banning religious symbols in schools.
These are not just empty diversions. If you repeat something enough, you end up imposing a way of seeing things.
There are only a few barely audible voices left in government opposing the move, though they include the current sports minister. On March 12th, Marie Barsacq told MPs that “wearing the headscarf is not necessarily a sign of infiltration. There are women who are simply practising their religious freedom […] and they have the right to do so.” But she lost the battle against interior minister Bruno Retailleau and justice minister Gérald Darmanin. She did not respond to Mediapart’s requests for comment.
Some politicians are already pushing things even further. On January 21st, seven MPs put forward a bill to “ban minors from wearing any clothing in public spaces that represents or symbolises women being inferior to men”. Aurore Bergé, the current junior minister for tackling discrimination, backs the move. “It's not easy to draft in constitutional terms, but it is our duty to do so, and I will play my full part,” she writes in her recent book Nos combats pour la République (published by Robert Laffont in March 2025).
First affected, last consulted
France is now the only country in the world considering such a measure, one that in 2023 was officially recognised as discriminatory by France's human rights ombudsman the Défenseure des droits. Amnesty International, the Ligue des droits de l’homme, the secular monitoring group the Observatoire de la laïcité and many other human rights groups have condemned the move as a blow to freedom, one that goes against the spirit of the 1905 law on the separation of church and state, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and several international agreements to which France is a signatory.
Banning sportswomen from wearing the hijab means openly targeting Muslim women, scapegoating them as if France had no bigger problems than a piece of fabric. The Muslim body the Conseil français du culte musulman warned on March 26th that this political and media frenzy was exposing such women to “growing forms of insecurity, to both verbal and physical attacks, which have become a daily reality for an increasing number of women, women whom the Republic should, above all else, be protecting”.
“These are not just ‘diversions’ with no purpose or endless repetitions with no aim. If you repeat something long enough, you end up imposing a way of seeing thing, so much so that one day it may well become a real proposal,” Hanane Karimi, senior lecturer at the University of Strasbourg and an expert on Islamophobia, warned in January about Bruno Retailleau’s push to ban the headscarf in universities.
The political class, meanwhile, remains oddly quiet, even passive. When Bruno Retailleau rails against the “poison of Islamism” and then openly declares “Down with the headscarf!”, a few speak out. But there has been no outcry, no joint statement from the Left saying no to this rising Islamophobia. Have we become so used to racist excesses that they no longer spark outrage?
French women who wear the headscarf remain, as always, the first to be affected and the last to be consulted. “The first thing I think about when I arrive somewhere is that, because I wear the hijab, people know I’m Muslim, so my behaviour has to be absolutely impeccable ,” a young woman called Amira told Mediapart in January, as part of a report on the struggles that young women who wear the headscarf face when looking for work.
“ ‘Down with the headscarf’ is just another way of wanting to control women’s bodies, to dictate how they should play sport, and to justify shutting them out.
When these French women dare to step into the public eye, they become a target. The group Les Hijabeuses – hijab-wearing sportswomen who tried to assert their rights before France’s top administrative court - were dismissed as engaging in “underhand proselytism” by François-Noël Buffet in the French Senate. The junior minister at the Ministry of the Interior claimed they were “draping themselves in the language of fundamental rights and personal freedom to sometimes push a separatist agenda.” Buffet continued: “That was always the real aim of these Hijabeuses. Entryism is now threatening our national unity everywhere.”
On March 27th, to coincide with Muslim Women’s Day, the feminist and anti-racist group Lallab published a report noting that 81.5% of Islamophobic attacks in Europe target women, according to 2023 figures from the anti-Islamophobia group Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en Europe (CCIE). The report also highlighted how Muslim women “remain overlooked in surveys, reports and measures addressing gender-based and sexual violence in France”.
Asked about Bruno Retailleau’s remarks on the veil, Lallab told Mediapart it condemned his stance as “sickening.” It said: “It's shockingly violent and part of a long line of racist and sexist attacks against Muslim women.” The group also pointed to the “lingering odour of colonial thinking”, recalling how French authorities had in the past staged public unveilings of Algerian women.
“‘Down with the headscarf’ is just another way of wanting to control women’s bodies,” Lallab stressed, “to dictate how they should play sport, to justify shutting them out, and, in the end, to brand them persona non grata.”
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter