Six years ago, France passed a law affirming—the government said reaffirming—the principle of absolute separation of church and state in public education. It evoked an earlier law, passed a hundred years before, that had ended a century of rancorous debate between the country’s secularists and Catholics as to the place, if any, of religion in the classroom. Call it a balancing of two of the French Republic’s fundamental freedoms—freedom of religion and freedom from religion. That law stated that all religious images and attire were henceforth forbidden in public schools, and in doing so placed French schoolchildren under what you might call the protective custody of a theologically neutral classroom, reminding parents that French citizenship was a social contract and had nothing at all to do with whether you wore a Catholic cross or a Calvinist cross or none at all. The law was occasionally challenged by the parties of the extreme nationalist right (Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National most recently) but the vast majority of the French embraced it and, for decades, so did most of the Muslim immigrants who converged on the metropole after the dissolution of France’s colonial empire, eager for assimilation.

That changed. France failed spectacularly to integrate its immigrant poor—and the children of those immigrants, proselytized from abroad and incited by a Saudi-financed and Egyptian-masterminded takeover of the country’s mosques by Islamist clerics, discovered radical Islam. At some point after 9/11, a few thousand French-Algerian girls began arriving at school in head scarves. Many people dismissed this as teen-age “identity fashion,” but most saw it as the symbolic tip of an Islamist iceberg—which in a way it was, since it carried demands for exceptional exemptions from French law and common secular values. The “veil law” of 2004, which I wrote about at the time for this magazine, was the official “no” to head scarves in the classroom, but the radicalization continued, fuelled in equal parts by exclusion and inequality at home in France and by the Palestinian crisis, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the mystique of universal jihad.

Today, several thousand French Muslim women emerge from their houses and apartments every morning wearing niqabs or burkas, their faces and even their eyes completely covered, and while they are not permitted to enter public schools, they make a strong and defiant statement everywhere else. Some are said to have been coerced or even threatened into shrouding themselves—by their fathers, their brothers, their imams, their internet “friends”—but whatever the truth of this, their presence in the public spaces of a secular state is not something that most French, including most French Muslims, will tolerate. France has no interest in becoming a multicultural society—or, to put it traditionally, a mosaic society or a tapestry of loosely bound communities. It is not the Ottoman empire.

President Sarkozy has said 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—and most of France would at least agree that the shrouding of women is a violation of human rights (not to mention of “transparency,” which is to say of post 9/11 security laws). On Tuesday, the deputies in the country’s National Assembly voted three hundred and thirty-five to one to ban the burka from public places and to impose huge fines on anyone discovered to have coerced a woman into wearing one. The French Senate will vote to ratify that ban in September—after which Spain and Belgium are considering introducing similar legislation. The repercussions of this week’s vote will make the question of head scarves look inconsequential.