Baby-Loup and the Ban on the Islamic Headscarf: How Sexularism Transformed French Republicanism

On June 25, 2014, the French Court of Cassation rendered a final verdict in the so-called Baby-Loup case by confirming the dismissal of a child-care worker for refusing to remove her Islamic headscarf. The case dates back to 2008, when the employee in question was let go on the basis that her headscarf was at odds with the "secular" values of the private nursery. The highly mediatized legal process concerning the dismissal had been going on for six years, and many public figures had put their weight behind the nursery's "feminist" ambitions. The Court's final ruling in favor of the day care center was a significant landmark considering that, traditionally, only public servants have been prohibited from displaying religious beliefs in the workplace.

By using the Baby-Loup controversy as an empirical starting point, my paper will examine recent developments in French public discourse. Instead of considering the entrenchment of the ban on the Islamic headscarf as a simple enactment or extension of the French principle of public secularism (laïcité), I will argue that these latest measures rely on the construction and mobilization of an ensemble of republican values. More specifically, my paper will empirically demonstrate that the headscarf ban was made possible through a discourse of sexularism – the confounding of the issues of secularism and gender equality. By employing a morphological approach to the development of French republican ideology, I will illustrate how sexularism transformed the exclusion of headscarf-wearing women into an acceptable measure aiming to guarantee "social inclusion."