Debates over citizenship, immigration, colonial memory, the reform of the state, the historiography of modern France, terrorism and security, and the complicated relationship between state and church have been exploited by politicians and galvanized society. Many of these debates are around the political concepts of republicanism, neutrality, and the spirit of laïcité which structure the vocabulary of French political actors and of ordinary citizens. In France, majority rule infringes on the rights of minorities. This chapter probes the debates concerning cultural policies in France in the face of what its government perceives as a challenge to its national raison d’être, including those revolving around the burqa, the niqab and the burkini. Freedom of religion is restricted to the private sphere while secularism is celebrated in the public sphere. It is argued that the burqa and niqab ban is neither just nor reasonable in the eyes of these women and girls, their families and community, and that paternalism that holds that the ban is for the women’s own good is a poor, coercive excuse. Claims for paternalistic coercion to protect adult women from their own culture when they do not ask for protection are not sufficiently reasonable to receive vindication.

Using comparative and global perspectives, this chapter places in an historical context the bitter controversies which have erupted across Europe and the Middle East in recent years over women's veiling, and especially their wearing of the face-veil or niqab. It shows how the deeper issues contained within these controversies – secularism versus religious belief, modernism versus tradition, individual freedom versus social or family coercion, identity versus integration – are not new but are strikingly prefigured by earlier conflicts. The chapter focuses particularly on the state-sponsored anti-veiling campaigns which swept across wide swathes of the Muslim world in the interwar period of high modernism, especially in Turkey and the Balkans, Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, narratives of these campaigns revealing much about the ambitions of modernism, the triumphs of nationalism and state-building, and the struggles of class and gender.. In contrast to the accepted view, which sees female dress reform and other modernist gender policies as largely imposed by male-dominated authoritarian regimes and deeply unpopular among both men and women, the chapter emphasizes the agency of women themselves as they intervened forcefully in contributions to debates and by adopting different forms of clothing on their own initiative. Again in contrast to existing scholarship, the chapter observes that governments saw their repressive policies as primarily aimed at recalcitrant men and at defending women as they unveiled against a possibly violent male backlash. The chapter concludes by showung how, in the late twentieth-early twentieth century, veiling was reimagined, reinvented and widely readopted, becoming sometimes a hallmark of the modern Muslim woman, sometimes of the radical Islamist, once again demonstrating its profound liminality.