Abstract
The French controversies around Islamic headscarves led in 2010 to a dramatic new law banning all full-face coverings from public space. This debate and its legislative aftermath constitute a new political sequence in France's difficult attempt to find a new historical arrangement between the Republican State (especially the 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State), public space, and religions not limited to Islam. I critically examine the five main justifications that have been used to ban full-face veils (niqabs and burqas) from public places. In the process, those debates and legislative developments have severely perverted both the spirit and the texts of the 1905 law, gravely betraying the French Republican ideal and principle of laïcité the partisans of the 2010 anti-veil law are nonetheless claiming to protect.
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