ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the role that Article 9 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (ECHR) has played in the French affaire du foulard, the ‘headscarf affair’.1 This is part of a larger research project concerning what I call the ‘public career of the Islamic veil in France’. By using the term ‘public career’, I refer both to the process through which the Islamic veil has become a public issue and to the successive developments of this issue from 1989 until 2004 (Galembert 2007, 2008). Although this story was clearly about politics, it immediately turned out to be about law, too. Indeed, in the autumn of 1989, barely a month after it began, the so-called affaire du foulard was brought before the Conseil d’État, the highest administrative court in France, by the Minister of National Education asking for a legal opinion on the issue.2 Since then, law and politics have remained intertwined as this enduring and sometimes heated controversy has unfolded. A famous result was the adoption in March 2004 of a law banning from state schools signs or clothing by which pupils overtly manifest a religious affiliation,3 a law that led de facto to the prohibition of headscarves. Any sociological account of the public career of the Islamic headscarf in France
would therefore be deemed incomplete if it focused only on the politics of the veil without emphasizing the extent to which these politics had been ‘legalized’.
