PARIS — France’s highest administrative court refused on Thursday to suspend the government’s prohibition on pupils wearing abaya-type garments in state schools, which means one of the country’s loudest arguments over laïcité and religious expression goes into the new school year with the government’s rules intact.
The Conseil d’État issued its decision in an urgent procedure brought by the association Action Droits des Musulmans against a ministerial instruction issued at the end of August. That instruction told schools that garments of the abaya type — and, on the government’s approach, qamis-type clothing as well — can amount to conspicuous manifestations of religious affiliation, which are prohibited in public schools. At this provisional stage, the court saw no justification for suspending the measure.
Important, yes. But narrower than the surrounding political shouting match suggests.
France has not banned long dresses. Nor does French law forbid pupils from every individual expression of religion. What exists is the 2004 law prohibiting pupils in public primary and secondary schools from wearing signs or clothing through which they conspicuously manifest a religious affiliation — and the current fight is over whether abaya-type clothing can fall inside that category. The government says that, in the context in which these garments were being worn in schools, they had acquired precisely that character. The associations challenging the measure argue, among other things, that it interferes with fundamental freedoms and invites discriminatory application.
Both sides, in a way, are illustrating the same old difficulty with laïcité: everyone knows the principle, almost nobody can apply it without reference to context. A cross, a headscarf or another expressly religious object is relatively easy to classify. A garment with no single universally agreed religious meaning is not — and school staff may end up judging not the cut of the cloth but the circumstances in which it is worn.
For pupils, none of this is theoretical. A student who arrives at a public school in clothing considered to fall within the ministry’s instruction can expect a conversation with school staff and, if that goes nowhere, may ultimately be kept out of class in that clothing. Which is to say that considerable weight now rests on how the measure is applied from one school to the next.
One more distinction the debate keeps blurring: pupils in public schools, public-sector employees and ordinary citizens using public services do not occupy the same legal position. Laïcité has never translated into a single dress rule for everyone in every public place in France, and the Conseil d’État’s decision does not make it one. The court answered a specific question — whether, in the context presented to it, the government could treat abaya-type clothing in public schools as covered by the existing prohibition on conspicuous manifestations of religious affiliation — not the much bigger question of whether religion may be visible in France. The court’s concise public explanation of the ruling is worth reading for exactly that reason.
Further legal examination of the measure may follow. For families and schools, though, the immediate reality is already at the gate: a national quarrel about religion, neutrality and the Republic, to be implemented each morning — one pupil, one garment and one decision at a time.
