In 2017 Saint-Jean de Passy, a private school in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, introduced what it called a “practical, modern and sober” uniform for all its pupils. On its website, the school explains that it took the decision because “we are living in an age where the competition of appearance all too often take precedence over the search for the simple dignity of the individual”.
Six years ago, Saint-Jean de Passy was an outlier among French schools, one of the few establishments where pupils arrived in matching skirts, trousers and jumpers. The few that did were overwhelmingly private Catholic schools, and more have followed in the years since.
This July Saint-Joseph’s school in Vendôme, central France, announced that as of this month pupils will wear a uniform in order to “avoid any divisions through clothing”. The headmaster, Charles-Édouard Guilbert-Roed, also expressed his belief that a uniform helps give the children an “identification”. The response from pupils and parents has been positive, and it may not be long before every school in France is following the Catholic example.
In January this year Brigitte Macron, the wife of president Emmanuel Macron, said that she was “for the wearing of uniform in school”. France’s first lady was schooled in a private Catholic establishment and later taught in one in Amiens, La Providence, where she famously met her future husband, who at the time was a pupil.
The president is known to lean on the advice of his wife, particularly on social and educational issues, so perhaps one should not be too surprised that Macron’s new minister of education, Gabriel Attal, announced on Monday 4 September that the wearing of uniform will be trialled during this school year. In a radio interview he said that he was “very much in favour of a trial so that it can advance the debate. The best way to get an idea is to test things out in schools”.
The experiment will be conducted after consultations with representatives from the education sector and will involve children of all ages.
My wife, who teaches French in a state school in Seine-Saint-Dennis, north of Paris, an area known for its deprivation, is in favour of the return of school uniform. She came to teaching late in life and was taken aback by the competition among her pupils to wear the latest trends, whether that be trainers, jeans or t-shirts. Then this year she witnessed something else among many of her pupils, the vast majority of whom have African heritage: the wearing of the Abaya.
This long baggy conservative Islamic dress suddenly became the must-have garment among the teenage girls in her class. And not just in her school. Across France the trend spread, first through social media, and then peer pressure. Some claimed the Abaya had no religious connotations and was simply an item of clothing no different from a skirt or blouse. The French government did not fall for that. Last week Gabriel Attal announced a ban on the wearing of the Abaya, declaring that it contravened the Republic’s strict rules on the wearing of religious artefacts in school. “Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,” he explained. “You enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the students’ religion by looking at them.”
France first proscribed the wearing of religious items to school in 2004, a law that applied across the spectrum but was ostensibly aimed at the growing number of girls arriving in the classroom wearing the Islamic hijab. Then, as now with the Abaya ban, many on the left are outraged and believe it smacks of “Islamophobia”.
There was no such outcry in 1905, however, when France enshrined in law its Secularism (Laïcité) by officially separating the church from the state. That law was driven by the left, who had in their sights the Catholic church, whose power they had long resented.
One might think it curious that a century later the left has become the biggest critic of Laïcité – in the name of conservative Islam.
Napoleon Bonaparte introduced uniform into French schools in 1802 at the same time that State education was born. Boarders at the Republic’s lycées were required to wear uniform (not day pupils), a custom that gradually declined in the early 20thCentury, although pupils wore regulation smocks – to protect their clothes from ink stains – until the 1960s. The introduction of the ballpoint pen in 1965 was a factor in their demise, but what finally killed off the basic school uniform was the cultural revolution of that decade. “It wasn’t until after 1968 that school dress became more varied and simpler, while at the same time opening up to the effects of fashion, particularly with the end of the ban on trousers for girls,” explained the left-wing newspaper Liberation in a recent article.
The left is broadly opposed to school uniform, although their arguments are weak and boil down to a vague assertion that it wouldn’t end social inequality. One suspects that their real hostility is because they regard it as authoritarian, elitist and Catholic.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and the centre-right Republican party take the other view, and have done for a number of years. In 2016 one prominent Republican MP, Jean-Francois Copé proposed [9] in every school the “raising of the flag, the singing of the Marseillaise and the wearing of uniform”, as a way to display pride in the Republic.
But above all, school uniform would put an end to any future attempts by Islamic extremists to undermine France’s secularism. Their strategy is to sow division between Muslim pupils and their peers, create a “them” and “us” in the classroom.
But modern France was constructed on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and these principles will be better protected in schools by a blazer rather than by an Abaya.
(A student, wearing an uniform with a school crest, walks to a building of her Excellence boarding school in Sourdun, eastern Paris, dedicated to under-privileged children in the Paris suburbs | THOMAS SAMSON/AFP via Getty Images)
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