France goes back to school with abaya ban as government mulls uniforms

Some 300 French students wore abayas on the first day of school, days after the Education Minister announced their banning. The issue of what Muslim students are allowed to wear in schools continues to stir debate in France, where reintroducing uniforms will be tested in the autumn.

A young woman wearing a yn abaya in Nantes, western France, 31 August 2023. France has decided to ban students from wearing abayas in school, and most have followed the directive. © Loic Venance/AFP

Out of France’s 12 million students who went back to school on Monday, 298 showed up wearing abayas – full-length, ample dresses worn by some Muslim women – according to Education Minister Gabriel Attal, who announced a ban last week.

Most of the students accepted to remove the dresses to attend school, he told BFM television, while 67 refused and were sent home.

Attal said the garment violates France's strict laïcité, or secularism rules that have been applied to schools since a 2004 law banned headscarves. Critics say abayas are cultural garments, not religious symbols, and that the government should not be policing what people wear. 

• Cultural garment or religious symbol? Debate over France's ban on abayas in school

The handful of students sent home Monday were given a letter intended for their families “to explain that laïcité is not a constraint, but a freedom,” Attal said, adding that the ministry deployed personnel to schools where they suspected there could be problems.

On Monday, he told RTL radio that 513 primary, middle and high schools, out of the 58,500 nationwide had been identified as “potentially concerned by these issues”, and that 2,000 people had been trained to deal with them.

Defending laïcité

President Emmanuel Macron weighed in on the decision to ban abayas and qamis (the equivalent for men), backing the Minister in an interview Monday with the YouTube channel ‘Hugo décrypte’.

“We live in a society with a minority – people who distort a religion and challenge the Republic and the concept of laïcité,” he said, evoking Samuel Paty, a teacher who was beheaded in 2020 by an Islamic militant who found out he had been shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a class on freedom of expression.

When the interviewer asked the President if he was making a parallel between Islamic terrorism and Muslim girls who wear abayas, Macron said no.

“I just say that the issue of laïcité in our schools is a deep issue,” he said.

Later Tuesday the Council of State is set to examine an emergency objection to the ban filed by a Muslim group. Under the procedure, it will issue a ruling by Thursday afternoon.

School uniform trial 

Meanwhile, Attal said Tuesday that he was in favour of trying out school uniforms or a dress code, to overcome the issue of what students can or cannot wear to school.

Uniforms were mandatory in schools until 1968, and the question of reintroducing them comes back regularly, most often from conservative and far-right politicians.

In January, Macron's wife, Brigitte, said she was in favour of uniforms in an interview with the Le Parisien newspaper that wearing a school uniform “erases differences” and saves time and money getting dressed.

Attal said he would give a timetable later in the autumn for a trial run of uniforms in schools that agree to participate.

"I do not think that the school uniform is a miracle solution that solves all of the problems related to harassment, social inequalities or secularism," he told BFM. But “we must go through experiments, try things out" to promote debate.