Behind the Veil

“France has no interest in becoming a multicultural society—or, to put it traditionally, a mosaic society or a tapestry of loosely bound communities,” writes Jane Kramer. “It is not the Ottoman empire.” She notes that the law comes, as much as anything, from President Sarkozy’s idea that “the defining duty of French citizenship is to engage with one’s fellow citizens, which is to say, to engage face to face in the public sphere and in the workplace, the metro, the market—in any secular space where citizens assemble.”