Headscarf row: Why is France suing a teen who wore a veil to school?

Laïcité is the French idea of secularism and it’s the centre of the country’s Constitution. Now the state is suing a teenage girl over it. What could she have done? She is said to have falsely accused the headteacher of a school of striking her after an argument over wearing a headscarf.

France has enforced a strict ban on religious symbols in state schools. This includes the Islamic headscarves, the full-face veils and the abaya (a loose-fitting full-length robe), which was added to the list last year. The country is home to Europe’s largest Muslim community and secularism and religion remain sensitive issues in the country.

The student at the Paris school flouted the law but why is the state stepping in? We explain the case.

What happened in the French school?

When the teenage girl wore a head covering on the school premises in Paris, the headteacher asked her to remove it, considering French law. The student falsely accused him of mistreatment in a heated exchange.

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The incident occurred on 28 February when the principal, who has not been named, told three students to obey the law and removed head coverings. While two girls followed the instructions, the third – an adult who was at the school for vocational training – chose not to, leading to an altercation.

The student had complained against the headteacher, accusing him of mistreating her during the incident. She told French daily Le Parisien that she had been “hit hard on the arm” by him.

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The headmaster started receiving death threats after the incident and has resigned. He sent an email to his colleagues at the Maurice Ravel Lycée on Friday, announcing his decision to “quit” his functions “out of concern for my own safety and that of the establishment”.

“I leave after seven years, rich and intense, spent at your side, and after 45 years in public education,” he wrote in an email, thanking his colleagues for support over the past three years, reports the BBC.

After the interior ministry was notified of the death threats the teacher received on social media, police were sent to patrol the school. Two people have been detained in connection with the case but the education ministry has said that they had no link with the school.

French education minister Nicole Belloubet also visited the school in early March and deplored the “unacceptable attacks” on the principal.

Now, the teacher’s resignation has sparked an uproar.

Why is France suing the teenager?

Officers have said that there was no evidence that the headteacher hit the girl. French prime minister Gabriel Attal has also come out in support of the principal, saying that the student would be taken to court for making false allegations.

A former education minister, Attal, said that the state would file a complaint against the pupil over falsely accusing the headteacher of mistreatment during the February incident.

“The state … will always stand with these officials, those who are on the frontline faced with these breaches of secularism, these attempts of Islamist entryism in our education establishments,” he said on the TF1 television channel.

In a further show of support, the education ministry said in a statement that it would never abandon teachers in the face of threats. The ministry said that “all teams” remained mobilised, adding that the principal’s decision to leave his post was “understandable given the seriousness of the attacks against him”.

The furore over the resignation has only grown with other politicians backing the headteacher.

Calling the incident “a collective failure”, Boris Vallaud, the head of the Socialist deputies in the National Assembly lower house, told TV broadcaster France 2, “We can’t accept it.”

“It’s a disgrace,” Bruno Retailleau, the head of the right-wing Republicans faction in the Senate upper house, wrote on X on Wednesday.

Voilà à quoi aboutit le « pas de vague », voilà où nous mènent les petites lâchetés et les grands renoncements. La démission de ce proviseur est le résultat de la démission de l’éducation nationale et de l’Etat tout entier.

Une honte. https://t.co/OAC8fpHDxg

— Bruno Retailleau (@BrunoRetailleau) March 27, 2024

Marion Marechal, the granddaughter of far-right patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen and a popular far-right politician herself, spoke on Sud Radio of a “defeat of the state” in the face of “the Islamist gangrene”.

Maud Bregeon, a lawmaker with French president Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, also criticised “an Islamist movement”. “Authority lies with school heads and teachers, and we have a duty to support this educational community,” he said.

Why is France coming out in support of the teacher?

France takes the threats from extremists seriously. This is not the first incident in France where a school teacher has been targeted. There have been two shocking murders in the past.

In October last year, an assailant stabbed to death a teacher and seriously wounded two others in an alleged Islamist attack. The knifeman reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar”, or “God is greatest”, during the attack at a school in Arras, northern France.

The funeral of the teacher Dominique Bernard was attended by French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Bridget.

In another shocking incident, a teacher named Samuel Paty was decapitated in a Paris suburb in 2020. In December last year, six teenagers were convicted for their roles in the killing.

Paty was killed outside his school in Paris after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class on freedom of expression.

France has been targeted by a series of attacks over the past decade, the worst being a simultaneous assault by gunmen and suicide bombers on entertainment venues and cafes in Paris in November 2015.

With inputs from agencies