On Bastille Day, France’s Muslims ask whether liberté, égalité, fraternité includes them
As the Republic marks its founding ideals, growing body of human rights research and academic analysis paints a picture of a country increasingly deploying its cherished principle of secularism to police the clothing, faith, and public presence of its estimated five million Muslims
By MNTV Staff Writer
Every July 14, France celebrates the values born of its revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity, ideals enshrined in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and repeated around the world as a model of democratic citizenship.
But for the country’s Muslim population — the largest in Western Europe, estimated at around five million in a nation of 68 million — those promises increasingly feel conditional.
A substantial body of human rights research, official reports, and academic analysis published over the past year suggests that the gap between France’s stated ideals and the lived experience of its Muslim citizens is widening.
The mechanism at the centre of that gap is laïcité — France’s distinctive form of secularism, whose 1905 law separating church and state turned 120 years old in December — a principle its defenders describe as a guarantor of religious freedom but which experts say has been steadily repurposed into a tool for restricting Muslim life.
Attacks surging by government’s own count
The French Interior Ministry’s own data leaves little room for ambiguity about the direction of travel. A comprehensive report on anti-religious acts covering 2010 to 2025 recorded 326 anti-Muslim acts in 2025 — an increase of 88 per cent on the previous year and 35 per cent higher than 2023.
The rise was driven overwhelmingly by attacks on people rather than property, with assaults and intimidation against Muslim individuals up 151 per cent over the course of the year.
Threatening remarks and hostile gestures directed at Muslims more than tripled, rising 210 per cent to 158 recorded incidents.
Among the most disturbing findings was a 317 per cent increase in cases where pig carcasses or pork products were deliberately left outside mosques and prayer rooms — a form of calculated religious provocation that rose to 25 incidents in a single year.
Anti-Muslim acts accounted for roughly 13 per cent of all recorded anti-religious incidents, a figure the ministry itself cautioned was almost certainly an undercount, since many victims never file complaints.
Measurable reality of discrimination
The scale of the problem is not a matter of opinion.
In December 2025, France’s independent rights ombudswoman published findings from a survey of 5,000 people representative of the national population, showing that religious discrimination is rising.
Seven per cent of respondents reported experiencing discrimination based on religion in the previous five years, up from five per cent in 2016.
Among people of Muslim heritage, the figure was dramatically higher: 34 per cent said they had faced discrimination, compared to 19 per cent for other religions including Judaism and Buddhism, and just four per cent among Christians.
Those numbers echo earlier research.
A 2019 study found that 42 per cent of French Muslims reported feeling discriminated against, with the burden falling most heavily on women who wear the headscarf, particularly in the job market.
Secularism weaponized
Nicolas Cadène, a jurist and former general rapporteur of France’s Observatory of Secularism — an advisory body the government dissolved in 2021 — has emerged as one of the sharpest critics of how laïcité is being applied.
He argues that years of debating Islam have produced what he calls a “great confusion” over secularism, shifting public discourse toward an increasingly restrictive interpretation.
Measures targeting Muslims, he warns, are not only discriminatory but counterproductive, aiding the very radicalism they claim to combat.
Cadène has described a pattern of politicians weaponising laïcité as a tool to curtail Muslim rights.
The far-right National Rally — whose ideological predecessors once opposed secularism as an anti-clerical conspiracy — has long used France’s secular rules to target Muslims by conflating Islam with immigration.
The trend reached a striking point in late 2025, when senators from the right-wing Republicans party published a report proposing 17 measures to combat “Islamism.”
These ranged from banning headscarves for mothers accompanying school trips to prohibiting Ramadan fasting for youths under 16 and imposing a blanket ban on hijabs in sport, even at amateur level.
The senators described Muslim headscarves as “banners for sexual apartheid.”
For experts, the report exemplified a growing tendency to target not extremism but Muslims as a whole — and to do so in violation of the very freedom of worship that the 1905 law was designed to protect.
Toll on women
Human rights organisations have been particularly forceful on the impact of France’s dress restrictions on Muslim women.
Amnesty International, in analysis of France’s move toward banning the hijab across all sports, warned that such measures would violate human rights and unfairly target Muslim women.
The organisation stated that laïcité, theoretically embedded in the constitution to protect everyone’s religious freedom, has often been used as a pretext to block Muslim women’s access to public spaces — noting that over several years, French authorities have enacted laws regulating Muslim women’s and girls’ clothing in discriminatory ways, with sports federations following suit.
Academic and author Nadeine Asbali has drawn attention to the double standard in how modest dress is perceived depending on who wears it.
When Muslim women make autonomous decisions about their clothing, she argues, they are cast as oppressed victims in need of rescue, whereas non-Muslim, often white women making identical choices are praised as forward-thinking.
The difference, she contends, comes down to which women are granted the full humanity to have their choices treated as genuinely their own.
The human cost is intimate.
Sarah Rahmoune, writing on the human rights implications of France’s hijab bans, observed that for many Muslim girls, growing up in France means constantly having to explain or defend their identity — producing stress, fear, and a sense of estrangement.
When the state passes such laws, she argues, it signals to the wider public that discrimination is permissible, making hateful behaviour easier.
Securitisation of ordinary faith
Beyond clothing, human rights monitors have documented how France’s counter-terrorism apparatus has drawn ordinary religious practice into the orbit of suspicion.
Amnesty International, in a report titled “Discrimination Against Muslims: The State Must React,” denounced a hostile climate and discriminatory discourse toward Muslims, highlighting a speech in which the interior minister listed basic religious freedoms — praying, fasting, growing a beard — as potential signs of radicalisation.
The report quoted a man whose mosque had been raided under post-2015 emergency legislation, who said the worst part was that if authorities had genuine concerns they would have opened an inquiry, but instead it simply felt like punishment for nothing.
The government’s 2021 “anti-separatism” law placed dozens of mosques under increased surveillance and required imams to be trained through a state-sanctioned body — measures that have left many French Muslims feeling stigmatised, and that Amnesty warned could be used to discriminate.
France has also dissolved several Muslim organisations by government decree, including the country’s largest anti-Islamophobia body, prompting Amnesty to express extreme concern about the signal this sent to NGOs and the broader fight against discrimination.
Committed to Republic
Perhaps the most important argument advanced by researchers is one that directly contradicts the premise underlying much anti-Muslim policy: the claim that Muslims are fundamentally incompatible with French republican values.
Academic analysis of the French government’s own reports on the Muslim Brotherhood — including the alarmist 2025 report presented by then-interior minister Bruno Retailleau — has argued that such framing serves primarily to delegitimise legitimate Muslim political participation ahead of elections and to bolster far-right parties as supposed guardians of the Republic against a manufactured threat.
The deeper reality, this scholarship contends, is that French Muslims are committed to the Republic’s principles — principles they helped define by embracing the ideals of the very revolution France celebrates on Bastille Day.
French postcolonial citizens, the argument goes, are more concerned with equality than identity, and the structural conditions that produce extremism are found not in Islam but in the absence of equal treatment.
Measure of Republic
International bodies have begun to take note.
The OSCE, in a 2026 assessment of religious freedom in France, documented how the rigid application of laïcité creates friction with the freedom to manifest one’s religion — not only for Muslims but for Sikhs facing difficulties with religious symbols in official ID photos, and for other minority faiths navigating administrative hurdles.
As France marks its national day, the question its Muslim citizens are increasingly posing is not whether they belong to the Republic, but whether the Republic is willing to belong to them — whether liberté, égalité, and fraternité are principles extended to all, or a promise that, for millions of French citizens, comes with an asterisk.
The evidence assembled by researchers and rights groups over the past year suggests that, for now, the answer remains uncomfortably unresolved — and that the true measure of France’s founding values may lie precisely in how it treats the citizens it most often asks to prove their loyalty.
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