The Culture War in France: A Dispatch from the Front Line

About one month ago something suspicious caught the eye of a French police officer patrolling the in the village Louvroil, in northern France .  He spotted a figure wearing a burqua behind the wheel of an automobile.

Now, the French police are not very effective when it comes to combating many crimes.  Occasionally they catch a murderer, but almost all petty crime goes unpunished in France.  Thievery is rampant.   Rioters are permitted to do whatever damage they please and the police are only interested in hearing about a rape if it is actually in process.  Muslims and Arabic-looking people are, however, regularly pulled over on the slightest pretense.

The policeman wrote the woman a 22 Euro ticket because he said that the burqa impeded the driver’s freedom of movement and posed a hazard on the road,  a violation of article 412-6 of the French highway laws.

The woman, a 31-year-old naturalized French citizen born in Algeria, protested that she could operate her car perfectly well while wearing the burqua.  Rather than pay the fine, she and her husband, Lies Habbadj (yes, “Lies”  is really his first name)  got the local mosque involved.  Habbadj held press a conference to charge the French government with racism and discrimination against Muslims.

France historically has had very generous immigration policies for people from former French colonies, all of whom at one point were considered French citizens.  As a result, France has a large Muslim population that originally hailed from northern Africa.  For generations many of these north African immigrants have resisted assimilation.  The French, in contrast to many Americans, aren’t much interested in “multi-culturalism.”  One should become French, of course.  Large numbers of North Africans and their offspring live packed together in ghettos throughout France and live as wards of the state.  Periodically their youth take to acts of violence in the streets of Paris, demonstrating that they appreciate at least some aspect of what it means to be French: the right to riot.

Religious attire for Muslim girls and women has been a point of contention in France for many years.  Girls are prohibited from wearing head scarves in public schools.   The French will tell you that they are not permitted to wear Christian symbols like crosses in schools either, but this is not much of an issue in the mostly secular culture of today’s France.

The French Assembly will vote in July on legislation banning the burqua in public places.  A woman found guilty of wearing a face-covering veil in public would be fined 150 Euros.  Any man forcing a woman to wear a burqua would face a 15,000 Euro penalty.  President Sarkozy, who supports the measure, said it represented a “moral choice” for France.  The Interior Minister said a burqua was against the country’s “republican rules.”

The incident in Louvroil obviously presages similar cases should the law pass.  It also stirred up the French authorities into fully investigating Habbadj.

According to French media sources,  it seems that the woman in question is only one of Habbadj’s three wives who have produced fifteen children between them.  Unlike the burqua, polygamy is already illegal in France.

Still more galling to the Gauls, the French state actually pays women to have babies and Habbadj’s wives have filed for public assistance, two of them as single women, and during the course of three years they’ve collected €175,000 from French taxpayers.  Added to this tidy sum are many big-hearted French social services.

Outraged, the authorities are threatening to strip Habbadj of his French citizenship.  Legally things get tricky, however, since Habbadj is civilly married to only one of the wives; he is religiously married to the other two.  Habbadj merely needs to plead that the other two woman are not his wives but his “mistresses” and what could be more French than that?