A parliamentary group on Wednesday called for a ban on the wearing of any visible religious symbols in schools, broadening a debate on whether Muslim girls can wear Islamic head scarves in class.
France's body politic is heating up over the issue, with some religious leaders fearing a ban will foment religious extremism while politicians say it is needed to preserve the country's cherished separation of religion and state.
The issue is all the more thorny because the Muslim community in France is large and growing at some five million, the largest in western Europe.
President Jacques Chirac returned the long-running topic to the political front burner in July, appointing a blue-ribbon panel of French intellectuals to study the broader issue of French secularism and recommend whether new laws are needed to defend it.
The 20-person panel, headed by national mediator Bernard Stasi, will report to the president by the end of the year. Its proposals are to provide the basis for an eventual decision on the head scarf issue.
Stepping into the fray on Wednesday, a parliamentary panel issued a text calling for new rules that would forbid any religious or political signs in public schools and be "brief, simple, clear and the least subject to interpretation as possible."
As it now stands, a 1989 ruling by the Council of State, France's highest administrative body, forbids any "ostentatious" religious wear, and individual schools can decide how to enforce it.
The parliamentary group went beyond that in its recommendation, urging a ban on "any symbol that the eye can see," which would include Islamic head scarves, Christian crucifixes or Jewish skullcaps.
Also Wednesday, the opposition Socialist party voted unanimously, with three abstentions, to present a bill that would forbid wearing of "religious signs" in school, and it urged principals and deans to start a dialogue with students on the matter right away.
A poll released Wednesday showed some 63 per cent of respondents believe a new law is necessary to ban the head scarf and other religious wear in schools, while only 33 per cent said none was needed. The survey of 950 people was conducted by the Ipsos polling agency on Nov. 7-8 for weekly Le Point magazine. No margin of error was given.
Chirac, whose party controls parliament, has said he will wait until Stasi's commission finishes its work before making a decision, but he has left open the possibility of a new law. Europe-1 radio reported last week that Chirac backs a strict and broad law that would also ban political and labour union insignia.
A broad spectrum of politicians from both left and right favour a new law. But religious, educational and one high-profile political holdout, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, are opposed.
"A new law immediately would be a dangerous position ... viewed as a humiliation that would lead to the radicalization of one another," he said recently. "The law must not be conceived or understood as raising questions about a religion."
A leading teachers union says the matter should by resolved individually by schools, while some religious leaders say a ban would only drive parents to put their children in religious schools.
The work by Stasi's commission goes beyond just the head scarf. It would need to address the resistance of some Muslim women to visiting a male doctor, or, ultimately, whether separate times for swimming should be enacted for women and men at public schools, for religious reasons.