In 1993, while a minister with responsibility for immigration, Charles Pasqua had announced that France would close its borders and that France would become a ‘zero immigration’ country. In 1993 he boasted of forthcoming crackdowns on illegal immigrants: ‘When we have sent home several planeloads, even boatloads and trainloads, the world will get the message.’ But it is doubtful that he believed this, even at the time. ‘The problems of immigration are ahead of us and not behind us,’ the same Charles Pasqua said a short time later, acknowledging that in the not too distant future the tens of millions of young people in Africa who were ‘without a future’ would be likely to want to head north.3

The French political debate throughout these years was both unique and utterly representative in Europe. Throughout those decades, in lieu of being able to deal with the larger issues thrown up by mass migration, the main parties of Western Europe concentrated on small, symbolic issues. Sometimes it was a boast. Sometimes it was a specially prepared ‘crackdown’ on illegal migrants. The thinking appeared to be that such issues would not only allow the politicians to look as though they were being especially tough on something, but would release a certain amount of public steam. The secular tradition of France made debates over how people dressed into particular touchstone issues.

So it was that the first headscarf debate in France emerged in 1989, when schoolgirls in the town of Creil, to the north of Paris, began to wear the headscarf to school and were banned from doing so by the school. In the ensuing debate the government of the day recommended that it was up to individual schools to decide on a policy towards headscarves. The matter returned in the 2000s when the growing visibility of the headscarf in French society and the need for government to be seen to be doing something led President Chirac (in 2004) to pass a law forbidding the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in public buildings. The French state had not reached the decision to ban such symbols in public schools or courts because of greater numbers of French Jews wearing kippahs and Christians wearing small crosses on their necklaces. Rather, they reached this decision based on the increase in veiled women appearing in public. Recognising that the growth of the wearing of the headscarf symbolised an upsurge in conservative Muslim sentiment wherever it occurred, the French government drew the line firmly to try to stop a trend and decided that tangling up all other religions with it was a worthwhile sacrifice.