Laïcité and the contestation of belonging: Muslim social identities in France twenty years after the headscarf ban

This article examines how French Muslims navigate the contested terrain of laïcité twenty years after the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols in public schools. Drawing on twenty-five in-depth interviews with French Muslims and first-generation immigrant residents conducted in Paris and Tours between July 2023 and June 2024, the study makes three connected arguments. First, it documents an analytical bifurcation in participants’ framings: a defence of the 1905 principle of state neutrality combined with a critique of its contemporary application as an instrument for the regulation of Muslim visibility. Second, it identifies a tension between empirical accounts of laïcité as institutionally fragmented and locally negotiated, and the way participants perceive and theorise it as a coherent system. The perceived monolith is itself a sociologically significant fact about how state power operates through discursive consolidation. Third, the analysis shows how citizenship status, gender, and racialisation produce divergent identity strategies: principled refusal among second- and third-generation citizens, pragmatic accommodation among first-generation residents, and a gendered vulnerability concentrated on visibly Muslim women. The article situates these identity strategies within structures that shape what kinds of resistance and accommodation become possible, rather than treating responses as freely chosen orientations.