A Muslim man has been jailed in France for punching a nurse who tried to remove his wife's burqa during an emergency C-section.

Nassim Mimoune, 24, was earlier banned from the delivery room after calling a midwife a "rapist" when she tried to perform an intimate examination on his wife in a Marseille hospital on Monday, La Provence newspaper reported.

The pregnant woman, who had been having contractions for two days when she was admitted, begged her husband to allow the examination, but he threatened her with divorce.

Mimoune, a construction worker from Paris, was then taken away to view the childbirth from another room, but flew into a rage when he saw the nurse removing his wife's burqa.

He smashed open the locked door of the operating room and punched the woman in the face, telling her to replace his wife's Islamic veil.

He was arrested on a charge of assault while his wife delivered a healthy baby boy.

Jailing him Wednesday for six months, the investigating judge described him as putting, "his religious dogma above the laws of the Republic and his French citizenship."

Mimoune apologized in court for his actions and admitted that he had endangered his unborn child.

He said seeing his wife's veil lifted in front of a male health worker was like seeing her "bare-chested" in front of another man.