There has been a mixed, tardy and often awkward political reaction to the ugly public humiliation of a headscarf-wearing Muslim woman and her young son, who was reduced to tears, by a far-right member of a French regional council during its plenary meeting in Burgundy on October 11th.
The events took place late on Friday afternoon at a meeting of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté regional council in the town of Dijon, east-central France. A small group of primary school children were present as part of a project to introduce them to the practical workings of France’s local and national democratic institutions, a programme called “My Republic and me”, organised by an association in the eastern town of Belfort, which sits in the region.
The children were accompanied on the excursion by a woman, whose son was one of the party, and who was wearing a Muslim headscarf, a hijab, which covered her hair but not her face.
As they sat in the public gallery of the council hall, Julien Odoul, leader of the group of councillors from the far-right Rassemblement National party (the former Front National), addressed the council’s socialist president Marie-Guite Dufay. “I am going to ask you, please, in the name of secular principles, to agree to ask the accompanying adult who has just entered the chamber to take off her Islamic veil.” To the clapping of his fellow far-right councillors, he continued: “We are in a public building, we are within a democratic place. Madam has every opportunity to keep her veil on at home, in the street, but not here.”
A tense verbal exchange followed, when Dufay refused to comply with his request, which had no legal grounds, before the RN councillors, led by Odoul, filed out of the halted meeting. But in the meantime, the humiliation of the woman accompanying the school children had distressed her young son to the point where he burst into tears. A moving photo of her hugging and consoling him was soon published on social media, prompting widespread outrage over the ugly incident.
Meanwhile, Odoul, 34, later posted a video of the events on his own social media account, which by Sunday had drawn tens of thousands of approvals, or “likes”, on Twitter, where he adjoined the comment that, “After the assassination of our four police officers, we cannot tolerate this communitarian provocation”. His words were a reference to the stabbing murders earlier this month of four police staff at the Paris police headquarters committed by one of their colleagues, an attack which is being investigated as a terrorist act motivated by his espousal of Islamist fundamentalism.
Shortly after Odoul and his fellow RN party councillors left the meeting hall, the mother accompanying the children, who has reportedly asked for her name to be withheld, also led the group out. According to an account given to French daily Le Monde by Jacqueline Ferrari, a councillor from the Union des démocrates et des écologistes alliance, the woman targeted by Odoul was then the object of incoherent verbal abuse from an independent far-right councillor, whose heated manner necessitated her to be restrained by a security guard. Ferrari told Le Monde she shouted: “You are in submission, you will see that when the Russians are going to arrive, you’ll clear off.”
Following the events, Dufay, president of the regional council, issued a statement expressing her “total solidarity” with the Muslim mother – who, she said on Saturday, she had subsequently had a “lengthy” conversation with – and the children she was accompanying, denouncing the “extreme gravity” of Odoul’s behaviour. In a message posted on her Twitter account, she said she would travel to Belfort on Tuesday to meet with the children, their teacher, and the adults accompanying them on the project which brought them to Friday’s meeting.
Beyond the ugliness of the humiliating incident, it also highlighted the ignorance of some amid the blurred boundaries surrounding France’s secular laws (first introduced in 1905 with the separation “of the churches and the state”). These in fact allow for the wearing of religious dress and insignia in public spaces – and which include, as underlined by Dufay, the meeting at the council hall. A 2010 modification to the law prohibits a person from hiding their face in public spaces, which, regarding Muslim dress, would include the wearing of the burqa and niqab. But the law does not prohibit the wearing of the hijab, or headscarf, in public.
Earlier this year, the French Senate approved a legislative amendment which required mothers accompanying children on school outings to remove their headscarf. The move, which split opinion among President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling LREM party and also the parties on the Left, was finally rejected by the National Assembly, the lower house.
In September, a French federation of parent-teacher groups, the FCPE, published a poster, in the run up to national elections, in which it was standing, to parent-teacher councils, showing a Muslim woman with a headscarf and a child which was accompanied by the heading: “Yes, I go on school trips, and so what?”, along with the caption, “Secularity is to welcome to school all parents, without exception”. French education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer described the poster as “regrettable” and a “mistake”, adding that the FCPE was trying, for electoral purposes, “to flatter communitarianism” – a derogatory term in France, referring to the practice of maintaining closed religious or cultural communities that are not integrated with wider society.
Interviewed by BFM-TV on Sunday about the incident at the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté regional council, Blanquer criticised Julien Odoul’s behaviour, which he said was “idiotic”, but he insisted that, “the headscarf is not desirable in our society”.
“We’re more and more in a situation of confusion, whereas what’s needed are rules of law to be respected,” added Blanquer. “In this case, wearing a headscarf was not prohibited […] On the one hand you have what the law says – it doesn’t prohibit headscarf-wearing women to accompany children. But it is certain that we don’t want to encourage the phenomenon. Thankfully we don’t prohibit everything by law.”
On Monday, economy and finance minister Bruno Le Maire joined the debate. Speaking on France Info radio, Le Maire said wearing the headscarf on school trips “is legal but, for as much, not desirable”. He said it should be decided “what culture we want to support”, adding: “As for me, I support a culture of equality between women and men […] in which religion remains in the sphere of intimacy, privacy, and does not have its place in the public space”.
Meanwhile, government spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye, in an interview with France 3 television channel on Sunday, said she had “no difficulty with a headscarf-wearing woman accompanying a school outing”, adding that she was expressing a personal point of view and that within the government there was “debate” on the issue. Further illustrating the divided opinion within the government, Cédric O, junior minister for digital affairs, reacted to Friday's events on Twitter: “When I was a child, in Villeurbanne [a suburb of the city of Lyon], many of my classmates came from Muslim families,” he wrote. “On numerous occasions their mothers accompanied us on school trips. Sometimes with a headscarf. That never caused a problem.”
His colleague Marlène Schiappa, junior minister for gender equality and the fight against discrimination, also took to Twitter at the weekend with the message: “It is by publicly humiliating mothers that one creates communitarianism”. That prompted a sharp rebuke from Marwan Muhammad, head of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, who responded: “You wake yourself up in 2019 about an undeniable and obscene scene of abject Islamophobia, while this type of exclusion takes place during the rest of the year, amid silence. It is also the fruit of your policies, of your abnegations. It is perhaps time that you ask yourself these questions.”
The scene at the regional council meeting also divided opinion within the far-right RN party, where Julien Odoul sits on its “national bureau”. Nicolas Bay, a former vice president of the party – which wants to see the wearing of the Muslim headscarf banned from public spaces – and who is now its chief spokesman, told France Inter radio on Sunday, referring to Odoul, that the incident was “a blunder by a young elected representative”.
“Obviously I would not have said it, and I would not have acted like that,” said Bay, who is also a Member of the European Parliament (MEP). “And here I’m talking a bit like a father. To place in question a woman alongside her child of a young age is a blunder and it is unwanted. It was needlessly hurtful and aggressive.”
“We consider the wearing of the headscarf to be either a militant political-religious act, or an act of submission,” he added. “We want to modify the law so that the headscarf is banned in the public space.”
Sophie Montel, a former member of the Front National (renamed Rassemblement National in 2018) who now sits as an independent member of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté regional council, also attacked Odoul, commenting that, “to attack a woman in front of children is lousy”.
Less surprisingly, there was also sharp condemnation of Odoul’s behaviour from a large number of representatives of leftwing parties, notably from the radical-left La France Insoumise (France unbowed) and the Parti Communiste. But the latter was the only political group to have issued a statement over the weekend on behalf of the party as a whole. While the Parti Socialiste remained silent, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, who led an alliance that included the socialists during the European Parliament elections in May, issued a statement inviting the children present at the regional council meeting and the adults accompanying them “to come and discover the European Parliament and the universalist principles defended there, against people like Julien Odoul, because our France is not his”.
But Odoul, in an interview with Europe 1 radio on Monday, made no apologies for his behaviour. “I have no regret for having defended the values of the [French] republic and of secularity,” he said.
“If there is one regret I have, it is that these children were confronted with the vociferations, insults and abuse by leftwing [councillors] which were shameful during the session,” he continued. “And it is them who created most of the tumult with their disproportionate reactions.” After listing the number of terrorist attacks and their victims in France over recent years, adding “in this context also where there are divisions on the subject of the headscarf”, he said that the woman he humiliated was either “naïve” or was driven by “provocation”.
Meanwhile, the regional council’s president, Marie-Guite Dufray, said she has alerted the public prosecution services of what was said during the plenary meeting, “including that regarding the contestation over the presence of this young mother”, and it was for them to decide whether legal action should be taken, adding that she was considering filing a complaint in her own name.
Shortly after the incident on Friday, Dufray said it had followed earlier inflammatory comments by members of Odoul’s RN group on the council. “From the beginning of the day, they accused the [local parent-teacher council federation] FCPE of accommodating Islamism, also accusing the regional [public] services of being gangrened by radical Islamism,” she said. “All these allegations are false and defamatory. Later, they spoke of their disgust over an exhibition against racism, [located] within the regional council, an exhibition that honoured Martin Luther King.”
The row comes amid heightened tensions in the country following the deadly October 3rd attack at the Paris police headquarters, where President Emmanuel Macron paid homage to the four murdered police personnel on October 8th. In his speech, he said the “Islamist hydra” cannot be defeated by the security forces alone, and spoke of the need “to build a society of vigilance” in order to detect the “slight signals” that indicate a person has become radicalised by Islamist fundamentalism.
He said this involved “these little nothings which become major tragedies”. Citizens, he said, are invited “quite simply to know how to recognise at school, at work, in religious places, close to one’s home, a slackening [of behaviour], the deviations, those small gestures which signal a distancing from the laws and values of the [French] republic; a separation”.
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- This is an abridged and updated version of a report published earlier in French, and which is available here.
English version with additional reporting by Graham Tearse