Unveiled: France's inability to accept Islam

The thesis I have written aims to investigate the underlying reasons why France has considered Islam as unassimilable and why it has targeted Muslim women’s bodies to force assimilation. In the first section of the thesis, I examine the colonial relationship between France and Algeria. I conclude that Algeria’s independence from France significantly influenced the negative treatment towards immigrants in postcolonial France. I then study the racist discourse that dominated French politics in the 1980s; and clarify how this has laid the foundation for the first attempt to ban the headscarves in public schools during the 1980s. The final section explores the 2004 ban on conspicuous religious symbols, a ban that significantly targeted the headscarf. I conclude that the prohibition of the headscarf undermined the rights of Muslim women and symbolized France’s inability to accept Islam, since France feared Islam’s visibility weakened a dominant French identity.