With Marine le Pen president, a woman could no longer wear the veil even in the street or in transport under penalty of a fine. Asked on Tuesday April 12 on France Inter, on the fact that France would thus become the only country to ban the veil in public space, the candidate of the National Rally defended her promise assuring that “Mr. Bourguiba had banned the veil in Algeria”.
A first error will not have escaped many listeners: Habib Bourguiba was never the president of Algeria, but of Tunisia, from 1957 to 1987. This confusion has also caused a large reaction on social networks with many tweets mocking Marine le Pen. Emmanuel Macron’s former minister, Nathalie Loiseau, even accused the RN candidate of lying.
It’s a feat but she did it: @MLP_official lies 2 times in 20 seconds. First, Bourguiba banned the veil only in schools and administrations, not in public spaces. Then he was Tunisian.pic.twitter.com/5czpBEG5TZ
— Nathalie Loiseau (@NathalieLoiseau) April 12, 2022
Admitting that the language of Marine Le Pen could fork, on the merits, this statement remains just as false. According to Tunisia specialists interviewed by franceinfo, the veil was never banned in the street under Bourguiba. The Tunisian president issued four circulars from 1981 to prohibit the wearing of the veil in the country, but “never on the street”, assures Hasni Habidi, director of the Center for Studies and Research on the Arab and Mediterranean World in Geneva. According to the political scientist, these circulars came to prohibit the veil only in public establishments: schools, administrations, public media.
This was done in the name of the neutrality of the institutions desired by Bourguiba, but “still with great flexibility in application”, tempers the director of the Center for Studies and Research on the Arab and Mediterranean World (Cermam). If female teachers in front of schoolchildren complied with this circular, arrangements could be made for less visible public officials. In this sense, the rules are currently much stricter in France on this subject than they were in Tunisia.
France is also rather an exception in the regulations governing the wearing of religious symbols. According to Nicolas Cadène, co-founder of the Vigie de la Laïcité, it presents the strictest framework in Europe, if not in the world. The former general rapporteur of the Observatory of Secularism recalls that in France, students are prohibited from displaying conspicuous signs of belonging to a religion and public officials are all subject to a principle of strict neutrality.
Elsewhere in Europe, legislation is very variable but never so strong or homogeneous. In some countries, the wearing of religious symbols is regulated in some cases, but not others. The rules can even vary within the same country as in Germany, where the restrictions are not the same according to the Länder.