Once again, the Rassemblement National (RN), a French far-right political party, has placed the Muslim veil at the center of French political debate. On August 30, 2026, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, an RN deputy, declared that if the party came to power, the Islamic veil would be prohibited in public spaces and that Muslim women who refused to remove it would be punished with a fine.

France’s fixation on and rejection of the Islamic veil is not new. It has deep roots in the country’s colonial project, particularly in North Africa and, more specifically, Algeria. Within the colonizer’s worldview, veiled Algerian women embodied backwardness and represented an obstacle to the full penetration and disintegration of traditional Algerian society and its family structures. Controlling women, their bodies and the way they dressed, and therefore unveiling them, was regarded as a means of accessing and transforming Algerian society itself.

During the Algerian War, particularly in 1958, coercive public unveiling ceremonies were organized in Algeria by the French colonial authorities and army. Veiled women were brought before crowds, photographers and soldiers and made to remove their haiks, long pieces of cloth covering a woman’s body and head, often worn with a small veil covering the lower part of the face. The colonial and propagandistic message was clear: France was supposedly emancipating Muslim women, liberating them by uncovering them and bringing them into modernity. Women’s bodies were turned into a spectacle through which colonial power presented itself as the “civilized liberator” of the “oppressed” Muslim woman.