A new year is always a time of reflection, and France’s interior minister certainly has a lot to think about.
Bruno Retailleau is responsible for law and order in a country where crime rates are spiralling.
Offences including murder and robbery dominate the news, but there are also episodes which expose the often hidden depravity of French society.
This was highlighted by the horrific multiple rape trial in Avignon at the end of 2024, when a so-called “ordinary Joe” was found guilty of allowing scores of Frenchmen just like him to defile his wife for up to a decade.
One might have thought that such abhorrent sexual violence by traditionally macho Gallic males would have dominated Retailleau’s pronouncements in early 2025, but no.
As usual, Retailleau has been speaking out against peaceful Muslim women who dare to wear headscarves in public places. In deeply disingenuous comments made on the 10th anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo shootings of 2015, he tried to portray all of them as potential terrorists.
“The threat of attack has never been so great as it is now,” said Retailleau, before calling for the strengthening of clothing bans.
Specifically, he wants women to be barred from wearing headscarves when they accompany children on school outings.
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He also called for such garments to be banned from universities – institutions that are meant to uphold France’s values of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’.
Such ideals are regularly ignored in a republic where some six million Muslims – the largest community in western Europe – have become a useful scapegoat for almost all ills.
If Retailleau had cast his mind back to the horrific Charlie Hebdo attacks, and indeed the subsequent atrocities in France carried out by Al-Qaeda and Daesh, he would have recalled that all were perpetrated by drugged-up male criminals dressed like special forces commandos, and not women in headscarves.
The killers’ motivation was ostensibly to take revenge for Charlie Hebdo having pilloried the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him), but multiple Muslims died in the slaughter too.
This made a mockery of Retailleau’s implication that everyone linked to Islam was partly to blame for atrocities committed by outlawed groups based in the war-torn Middle East.
If it sounds like there might be a racial element to Retailleau’s discourse then it is backed up by his words about the millions of French citizens – many of them dark skinned Muslims – who live in neglected housing estates on the edges of major cities including Paris, and who can trace their origins back to former French colonies.
When there were protests following the shooting dead of teenager Nahel Merzouk – whose family originally came from Algeria and Morocco – by a policeman in 2023, Retailleau spoke of “ethnic regression” among those whose forebears were immigrants.
In summary, he suggested that those of Arab and Berber stock linked to France’s old North African Empire, for example, were going backwards in terms of acceptable behaviour and all round integration.
Such blatant racism clearly extends to Retailleau’s views on headscarves, which in his mind are associated with inferior races. In fact, the headscarves – which come in all shapes, colours and sizes – are not specifically anything to do with the Islamic faith. It just happens that a lot of Muslim women wear them.
In turn, Retailleau spoke of the garment being a symbol of a “political Islam” that “threatens our institutions and national cohesion”.
He conjured up a “slow conquest, which aims to infiltrate all sectors of society”. One of the ways to stop this – went his argument – was to ban the headscarf because it had become “a standard for Islamism, and a marker of the inferiority of women compared to men.”
The truth is that there are plenty of women in France who choose to wear headscarves independently. They are just like those who regularly wear them when out in the countryside (as the late Queen Elizabeth II did), or Roman Catholics who wear a mantilla, or Jews who who wear a tichel.
As with all the other headwear, Muslims see the headscarf as an expression of their cultural conservatism and it makes them feel respected. In terms of faith, they believe it expresses a humble nature before God.
Whatever the case, the vast majority of wearers are ordinary wives, mothers, or single women leading conventional lives. That’s why you see them looking extremely unthreatening with their children and working in all kinds of perfectly normal jobs.
If they are indeed the victims of oppressive males, as men like Retailleau allege, then ample legislation exists to see their tormentors tried and punished.
In which case, projecting the garments as detested symbols of an enemy within simply highlights the abject bigotry of reactionaries like Retailleau.
Moreover, there are millions of Muslims – the vast majority – who have enough economic and social problems to worry about, without having time to “conquer” anything, least of all France.
Many are company employees, or civil servants, while plenty more are unemployed and poor thanks to a France that discriminates against them.
In short, Muslims are not the powerful civilisation-threatening monsters that Retailleu alludes to.
Another of Retailleau’s new year pronouncements included warm words for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the convicted racist and Holocaust denier, who died aged 96 on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo commemorations.
Praising Le Pen for leaving “his mark on his era”, Retailleau said nothing about his fearsome prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities; especially Muslims.
The Rassemblement National party Le Pen founded as the Front National in 1972 with fellow Nazi sympathisers and colonial nostalgists who had tortured Algerians during the war of independence is currently in the ascendancy in France.
One of the main reasons it is doing so well is because the poisonous prejudices of men like Bruno Retailleau are now accepted as mainstream.
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.