PARIS — During a recent protest in Marseille, seven people were suddenly surrounded by the police, bundled into a van and brought in for questioning. Their offense was not the demonstration itself but the balaclavas they were wearing, a violation of the French law banning full-face veils in public places, passed in April 2011.
The demonstration was against the conviction of the feminist Russian punk band Pussy Riot, hence the balaclavas, but the law was aimed at what Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president, considered a rise in Islamic extremism in France.
From the beginning, critics warned that the law, in addition to depriving Muslim women of their rights, would further inflame tensions already raised to a high pitch by the economic crisis, riots and lingering fears of terrorism, on one side, and accusations of racism on the other.
A little more than a year later, however, defenders and critics agree that the actual impact of the law has been far less dramatic than the politicized prologue, largely because of tolerance from most Muslims and the police.
France’s experience with the burqa bill is in many ways a proxy for the country’s — and Europe’s — ability to integrate its Muslim population, the largest on the continent. The Belgian government hopes to enact a similar ban on the niqab — which covers every part of the face except the eyes, and is popularly and mistakenly called a burqa — and the Dutch government has said it hopes to pass such a law next year.
Since the law went into effect, 425 women wearing full-face veils have each been fined up to 150 euros, or $188, and 66 others have received warnings, said Pierre-Henry Brandet, spokesman for the Interior Ministry. But even the police concede that they rarely enforce it, having no desire to further increase tensions.
It was to avoid accusations of discrimination that the Sarkozy government originally wrote the bill as a security measure, proscribing anyone from wearing clothing “intended to hide the face.”
But it also set prison terms for anyone forcing another to wear the full-face veil, a measure clearly aimed at Muslims.
Defenders of the law, which has been popular with the public, said that France needed to protect its “republican values” of secularism in the public space; many also said that France’s Muslims, immigrants and French-born, must accept French norms.
