Rights defender Claire Hédon published a report at the end of 2025 on discrimination based on religion. This supports and objectifies, based on testimonies, detailed and legally founded comments, discrimination which affects people because of a proven or presumed affiliation to Islam.
The report by rights defender Claire Hédon constitutes an important contribution to documenting the reality of Islamophobia in France. The defender notes:
“The increase in discrimination on religious grounds seems to be observed regardless of religion. However, they remain significantly more often reported by people who declare themselves to be of the Muslim religion or to be considered as such (34% of them) than by people declaring themselves to be of another religion (19%), including the Jewish religion or even Buddhism, or those of the Christian religion (only 4%). declare that they have been discriminated against because of this religion) »
Focus on the Islamic veil
To this end, the report offers a legal analysis of the claims of people who believe they are victims. Such discrimination oscillates between stereotypes of different species, and abusive interpretations of the secular principle.
The veil, which has been the subject of media and political focus for more than three decades, is the main reason causing contentious situations. The defender highlights an “over-representation of Muslim women wearing the veil in referrals”. Thus 31% of referrals to the defender come from Muslim women compared to 9% for Muslim men.
The defender cites, for example, the experience of a veiled mother wishing to accompany the class of her daughter in CE2. The latter was rejected by the teacher on the grounds that she would have been in charge of a group of students and that as such it would have been impossible for her, because of “the law of secularism”: a reading at the erroneous evidence of the law of March 15, 2004, which only applies to students.
Other situations are reported, with an equally unfounded interpretation of the said law: graduates are “prohibited from accessing their diploma award ceremony”, even though former students and Potential future students are not subject to the obligation of neutrality. Other cases report discrimination in higher education for wearing a headscarf, although it is entirely legal in this context. And that certain parties and personalities would like to absolutely proscribe against all odds.
Even more harmful is the discrimination emanating from civil servants or authorities responsible for law enforcement, who are expected to know the law, its areas of application and to set an example: a mayor refused to allow a woman wearing a veil to hold a stand at a local Christmas market, requiring it to a duty of neutrality, abusive in this case, to the extent that it was not a public service mission. In this respect, it is permissible to say that veiled women are exposed to “discriminatory moral harassment” even in their workplaces.
Discrimination at work
People of Muslim faith also encounter particular difficulties in professional integration. It appears from the report that when they work, they occupy “less often” “qualified” positions (12% managerial and 22% intermediary); they are “often employed” (36%) or workers (30%), “professions exposed to high labor turnover”. As for the private sector, in precarious contract positions, 27% of those who occupy them are Muslims “compared to 13% among those of Christian faith or 16% of those without religion.” The level of discrimination experienced “in career development” is more significant among women than among men of Islamic faith.
Another emblematic case of this suspicion constructed and perpetuated this time by senior state officials: an individual was prevented from applying for a job as an assistant police officer “because of a mark on the forehead (devotional dermatosis called “never“), a consequence of his diligent practice of Muslim prayer”, and which is also generally involuntary. To justify such a measure, the prefect cited both the fear of “a risk of radicalization” and non-compliance with the obligations of neutrality and secularism if the candidate were to be recruited.
Situations of discrimination, it is also specified, affect both the public and private sectors; there is even a question of “ambient” harassment which reflects a doubt or an exacerbated suspicion about people physically assimilated to Islam, such as these “repeated jokes about religion” from an employee, during work meetings, “because of his religious beliefs”, the spreading of rumors about him, etc. This is what could be described as a manifest expression of a culture of suspicion, with the pretext of jihadist or Islamist violence to legitimize its merits. Muslim visibility would be either a warning sign or a symptom.
What are the causes of this discrimination?
Such a report is an opportunity to question further the sources of this religious or ethno-religious discrimination, by noting certain analogies, which are imperatively careful, with other periods of French history.
Today, anti-Semitism has not disappeared and Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim hatred, has joined it, appearing as a common, almost banal racism. But looking closely, it seems that the same mechanisms are at work in both cases of racism, since it involves questioning the “present legitimacy” of each person, in other words their “Frenchness” or belonging. to the body of citizens, on equality with others.
At the end of the 19th centurye century and during the following century, the Republic and secularization were denounced by some as corrupting forces, accused of dissolving the French nation and its supposed ethnic purity. Because they were based on a principle of indifference to skin color, origin or religion, they were suspected of facilitating the “contamination” of the country by foreign or allogeneic elements – first and foremost the Jews – in their opening access to “state charges”, as Maurice Barrès was particularly offended.
Nowadays, on social networks and from the writings of certain opinion leaders or a few rare academics, a state civil servant or a politician of the Maghreb type, and possibly a Muslim, could be easily suspected of engaging in “entryism” or practicing a tactic of “concealment” (taqya), in order to hide his true seditious intentions, in the service of political Islam.
Entryism and separatism thus constitute two convenient accusations, to the extent that they can directly or indirectly target visible Muslims in the public space while avoiding a racism trial. It is in this sense that the stigmatization against Muslims is qualitatively different from that which formerly targeted, more directly, the Jews, and this in a manner that could not be more indistinct.
It is against the Republic that anti-Semitism was able to express itself, but, in an extraordinary reversal, it is in the name of this same Republic and its secularism that Islamophobia can give free rein, under the pretext of a fight against “Islamization”.
The essayist Renaud Camus offers a good example of both a migration of the anti-Semitism of yesteryear towards a healthy Islamophobia through the use of the so-called “great replacement” to vituperate “the change of people and population”, to which “the streets” would testify entire streets, avenues, entire neighborhoods […]countless metro trains, station platforms, minarets, veiled women.”
By objectifying multiple discriminations in the private and public sector, the rights defender’s report decisively confirms the existence of a culture suspicious of – real or supposed – manifestations of Islam in public spaces. This work must be extended by more robust historical and sociological analyses, in particular by the meticulous deepening of the analogies between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
