Brigitte Macron Advocates Neutrality on School Veil Issue During Paris Visit

This outing by the wife of the French Head of State, who was accompanied by the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, is part of her participation in the dictation of the European Association against Leukodystrophies (ELA).

Brigitte Macron took the opportunity to read to sixth-grade students an unpublished text signed by Nicolas Mathieu, the 2018 Goncourt Prize winner, reports the site, dhnet.be.

But the former French teacher, who taught in Jesuit schools, also gave her opinion on the wearing of the veil during school outings.

"As teachers, we don’t talk politics, we don’t talk religion, that’s not our field, we have to be neutral. I am secular, that’s part of our ethics, we teachers, not to influence our students. On the other hand, the position, it’s the minister who made it, and very well done. Maybe he’ll want to comment on it for us," she said.

Following Brigitte Macron, the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, for his part, indicated that the veil "is not an ideal of society" in the name of "equality between men and women".

To nuance, he added: "I don’t think it’s such an important issue and I agree to say that mothers should feel included in the school, so a law could be counterproductive."

He ended by launching an appeal: "We wish that little girls do not live with the idea that it is a good thing to live with the veil. In non-democratic countries, there are women who sacrifice their lives, their freedom, for equality between men and women."

The controversy had intensified when an elected member of the National Rally (RN) asked a woman who was accompanying a group of children to the Plenary Assembly of the Regional Council of Burgundy-Franche-Comté to remove her veil, recalls the same source.

On the issue of wearing the veil, the French remain divided. If, for Sibeth Ndiaye, Spokesperson of the French Government, the presence of veiled accompanying mothers does not pose "any difficulties" and that it allows, on the contrary, better "integration" of these women, Christian Jacob, newly elected President of the Republican Party (LR), called on Monday for the banning of the veil during school outings.