IN THE FALL OF 1989, three young North African immigrant women students in a French public secondary school insisted on wearing headscarves in class. In France, secularism in the schools is national policy, and the young women's insistence on keeping their heads covered in the classroom was locally interpreted as a religious challenge to academic regulations. They were suspended from school, but refused to return without the scarves. The incident gained national publicity, exciting a variety of passionate responses in support of the students and in support of the local school authorities. Eventually, the Socialist national minister of education ordered the students readmitted to class, prompting further debates about the capitulation of institutional authorities to fanaticism. In the public press, as well as in more specialized journals, the incident was known as l'affaire dufoulard: the affair of the headscarves, a discrete local problem that developed into a crisis of French national identity. In November 1993, Anna Elisabetta Galeotti's discussion of the original incident, Citizenship and Equality: The Place for Toleration, was published